Post-9/11

“Post-9/11 mindset” was a term that started getting thrown around Sept. 12, 2001. I was eleven at the time, and a lot of the talk was about how my generation would be affected by the change in national perspective. I couldn’t have cared less, and as I grew into young adulthood in the only world I’d ever known, the term continued to sound like a meaningless buzzword used by pundits to try and easily explain away everything happening around us. It then appeared as an excuse to infringe upon our civil liberties, and my apathy toward the term turned into vitriol. I thought it was an overblown, meaningless term that gained popularity because it was an easy excuse for any behvaior. It wasn’t until I went to a baseball game with my grandparents the week before I started at Goucher that I accepted the reality of the different generational perspectives. 

We got to the stadium and they wouldn’t let us into our seats, saying that there was a “suspicious package” left unattended that they needed to investigate. We were stuck sitting downstairs in the little health center until the area was cleared. My grandparents were concerned and wondered why, if there was a possible bomb, the entire place wasn’t being evacuated. I, more used to the hypervigilance of our times, was nonchalant and told them “it’s probably a bag of potato chips or something. They don’t really think it’s a bomb, they just have to follow protocol because it could be.” They didn’t understand how everyone was so calmly accepting the paradoxical assumption that “it’s not a bomb, but it might be,” but I come from a high school that evacuates into the parking lot for bomb threats and I’ve never been to a mall, airport or concert venue that didn’t request that we report “suspicious or unattended bags.” 

It gets more complicated than that, however. Fear turned into annoyance and my grandfather didn’t understand what was taking so long. I told them “they can’t just go poke it and see if it explodes,” and I was prepared to patiently wait for the situation to be cleared up. It’s easier for me to conceive of the possibility of such an act of public violence, because they happen today in schools and trains and other places. I’m also used to waits like this, and I anticipate the possibility of one every time I set foot in a public place. It was interesting to me how I was much less upset about having to wait even though I was less concerned about the actual threat, while my grandparents were more afraid but also more impatient. 

Conclusion: there is something to the “post-9/11 mindset” and it’s much more complex than just being afraid of terrorists or feeling desensitized to the threat. I see the world differently than older generations. To me, the threat of random civilian bombings or shootings is real and I take it for granted that it’s a risk we take by existing in this society. I also expect to deal with the necessary reactions to this threat, even though I know that the majority of the time, the alarm is false. 

My grandparents seem to see it as more black-and-white: either there is a threat and we should be very frightened, or there is not a threat and we should not be inconvenienced. Our generation inhabits a grey area where the threat of terrorism is almost a Shroedinger’s cat scenario – it may and may not exist simultaneously, and we must always act according to this dual possibility, refusing to allow ourselves to react as if it was certainly present but also preparing ourselves for its possible presence. Oh, and remember my theory on the cause of the panic? We found out later a cameraman had left his lunch in the wrong place.