Growing Up 9/11

The past decade hasn't been the planet's brightest. Those who grew up under 9/11's shadow know that most acutely, but haven't let that hold them back.

The darkest day in North American history started as a sunny Tuesday morning, announcing the arrival of a decade that some say ended with the death of Osama bin Laden but whose effects will linger long after. For those who came of age during that decade of grief, anger and absurdity, it's a day that looms impassably large in our memories, but a day that recedes further into the past all the time.

As far as generation-defining moments go, 9/11 is about as tragic and confounding as it gets, especially when stacked next to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or Woodstock. We had images of bodies jumping out of burning buildings and the jewel of the West shrouded in smoke and chaos instead of young Berliners embracing each other or the mixture of free love, drugs, and music spawning a new consciousness on a pastoral upstate New York farm. If you were in your teens when the towers collapsed, or on a university campus amid the foulest of the Bush years, it was tough to avoid feeling powerless as two new wars erupted and security at home steadily grew into a national addiction with a limitless appetite. Along the way, and perhaps because of that addiction, the economy began to slump, then recess, then almost completely collapse, decimating a job market that had demanded we all saddle ourselves with mountains of debt for education meant for jobs that suddenly no longer existed. The existential dread of living during an indefinite war against something as nebulous as terror, coupled with the knowledge that we'll probably never be as well off as our parents, hardly bode well for our faith in government, the economy, and justice.

Consider the major events we've witnessed since 9/11: the 10-year (and counting) Afghan War; the Iraq War and its false pretenses, bloody escalation, and senseless toll; terror attacks in London, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, and now Norway; natural disasters – from the Boxing Day Tsunami to Katrina to Haiti to Fukushima – that exposed the frailty of our cities and questioned man's precarious relationship with nature; the Great Recession, brought to you by banks willing to mortgage the lives of millions for the mad pursuit of profit; the pervasive institutional distrust of Muslims; torture coming back into vogue. And that's not including the incremental creep of inconveniences – CCTVs and shoeless security checks, to name but two – and irrationalities, like those thankfully disposed-of colour-coded terror alert levels, that have needlessly complicated our lives. On top of all that, our understanding of those matters was warped by a 24-hour cable news world where myopia and the pursuit of ratings all but killed facts and depth. It has not been humanity's brightest decade, and its burden has not been easily borne by those who will inherit its problems.

(And yet, sadly, here's our prime minister, just this past week, claiming Islamicism is the biggest threat facing the country. Not our dependence on the United States as a trade partner, or aboriginal poverty, or our reliance on fossil fuels to keep our country growing, or climate change, or a demographic time bomb, or the housing bubble? Islamicism?)

So far, though, we've coped by detaching ourselves from that mess and reconnecting in ways previously unimaginable. With the real world becoming harder and harder to reckon, we ensconced ourselves in social networks, illegally downloaded music and movies, and sub-sub-cultures, all of which were enabled by the greatest technological achievement since man landed on the moon: the Internet. The rise of the Internet, from digital curio into some sort of parallel planet from which comes almost all of our communication, knowledge, and entertainment, was the yin to the yang of our societal and political steps backward. For every Google thrusting our species into the future, there was a Sarah Palin trying to drag us back. On too many days it has felt as if the latter has won out, until you recall the now-immortal words of comedian Louis CK: “Everything is amazing right now, and nobody is happy.” We have freaking iPhones, little pods that carry around access to everything on the planet, in our pockets! The U.S. elected a (mildly disappointing, but still alright) black president! Gay people can get married! Television became legitimate art! We're going to live until we're 150!

These undercurrents have made us more likely to read The Onion and watch The Daily Show than The Globe and Mail or The National, more likely to vote for So You Think You Can Dance than for an MP, more likely to be self-, under-, or unemployed than riding the escalator to corporate glory. When we were youngsters, before that darkest Tuesday, we were told by parents and teachers that we could be anything we ever wanted. Given all that's happened in the past 10 years, can it really be a surprise that we've taken those same adults up on that offer? Which isn't to say that we're entirely self-absorbed hedonists, despite being derided as just that so often. We've just realized that all those demands of going to school, working at a job you hate, getting married, buying a house, and hoping for a retirement somewhere warm just aren't worth the worry, not when every airplane you take could take a detour into the CN Tower. The same goes for our forebears' bitter preoccupation with matters of race, faith, sex, and sexual orientation. Not that those divisions have all disintegrated, mind you, but an indiscriminate terror attack tends to render them meaningless. That could very well be 9/11's biggest legacy on the generation it impacted the most: live every day like it's your last.

At the same time, though, don't worry about us. When you learn about the bloodiest terror attack in the history of North America, a land once thought to be impenetrable, as a half-awake Grade 10 student in math class, you learn to cope. Our senses of humour are wholly intact (they'd have to be, after everything we've been though). We have a better grasp on the consequences of our actions, whether it's knowing where our food comes from or why taking public transit, despite feeling like the end of the world at times, at least helps delay just that from happening. We can adapt – to new technologies, ideas, workplaces – with an ease that our hunt-and-peck predecessors could only dream of. Most of all, though, we've not been paralyzed by fear but instead liberated by it, enjoying the lives we're lucky enough to have. Ten years ago today, we witnessed the worst side of humanity as doe-eyed teenagers or children. It's our responsibility as adults to never let that hold us back.

- Mike Barber, News Editor