Here we are: a quarter of a century has gone by since 9/11. On the tenth anniversary of the attack, back in 2011, I had this to say:
On that black day ten years ago, Nina and I stood on the roof of our Brooklyn home and watched the towers burn, and fall. Our daughter, now in her twenties, was in school at Stuyvesant High, just a couple of blocks from the doomed buildings; we didn’t know until that evening whether she was alive or dead. Our city was shattered, stricken, numb with grief and horror. I lost no family members or close friends, but everybody — everybody — knew someone who had. The awful shock jolted me, as it did so many others, from a comfortable complacence about the security of Western civilization to acute concern, and led me to a decade-long study of Islam, and of the history of the ancient conflict of which this was just the latest engagement…
… Where do we go from here? Obviously we are still confronted by an implacable foe, the same relentless enemy the Christian world has grappled with since the seventh century.
What have we learned? Nothing at all, apparently. The influx of Islam into the West not only didn’t stop, but accelerated after the towers fell, and New York City — Ground Zero! — now has a Muslim mayor who advocates “globalizing the intifada”. More than 100 new mosques have opened in New York, and the Muslim population of the city’s metropolitan area has swelled to 1.5 million.
September 11th, 2026, is, yes, a grim anniversary, but for me the real sorrow is not just about that awful day, but about everything that came after, the prospect of what lies ahead, and the intractable immensity of our stupidity.
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P.S. — see also this post, from 2015.
“Where were you?” reflections remind me of how radically the world has changed. I first heard a plane had crashed into the WTC when I went to the main office of the Geography Department to pick up my mail. Important communication still took place with physical mail in those days. Fifteen years later, I would go to my mailbox in the main office once a month and transfer its contents directly into the trash.
I went back to my office and sought more information on a radio, as there was no internet and I still trusted the MSM. Seeking news on a radio now seems as antiquated as seeking a book with a Dewy-Decimal Index card file. Trusting the MSM now seems as naive as a child getting into the car of a strange man who offers it candy.
These anachronisms are only incidental to the intractably immense stupidity noted in your post, but they may help readers under the age of 30 to more fully understand the difference of that lost world.
One last anecdote, this one pregnant with meaning relevant to your theme. It may have been eight or ten years ago that I entered the gas station at Roans Prairie, a crossroads hamlet in which the gas station has pride of place. Inside were three women in burkas or chadors and niqabs. They were maintaining order in a gaggle of children while a man, presumably husband to all three, paid cash for his gasoline. This sight would not have turned my head in Houston, but it was portentous to see it in Roans Prairie. The portent was not good. And its truth has been confirmed every day since.