I was sitting in the USA TODAY headquarters in McLean, Virginia, when a report of a person with a weapon prompted heavily armed police officers …
I was sitting in the USA TODAY headquarters in McLean, Virginia, when a report of a person with a weapon prompted heavily armed police officers to evacuate the building and direct us to shelter in the basement of a nearby hotel. Sept.11,2001, was a formative memory for many millennials and life-changing for older generations, like Gen X, my parents among them. But Gen Z has no collective memory of what happened that day 20 years ago. Many research institutions identify 1996 as the cutoff point between generations specifically because those born afterward have little to no memory of the attacks. To many,9/11 is history. I’m Grace Hauck, a breaking news reporter based in Chicago. Many of the Gen Zers said they first learned about 9/11 in school on the anniversary of the attacks and spoke about it as an abstract, New York-centric event. They spoke of the planes hitting the towers, the first responders, the victims. Katie Brockhage,24, said the first conversation she remembers having about 9/11 was in first or second grade. « The teachers just told us that there’d been an attack and that it was these bad people over in some country I’d never heard of, » said Brockhage, a defense contractor for the U.S. Air Force in Colorado Springs. Others talked about learning about 9/11 through family stories, social media, Hollywood movies, anniversary news coverage, museums, books and other pop culture. Ben Chang,21, was 15 months old in the day care at 5 World Trade Center when the first plane hit the twin towers. He said it wasn’t until 2018, when he saw the movie « Vice, » a black comedy about former Vice President Dick Cheney, that he came to understand 9/11’s place in a larger historical context. Some, like Ronnie Monroe,19, who grew up on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, said 9/11 hasn’t been a big topic of conversation in his life. While it affected him as a U.S. citizen, it hasn’t affected him personally. Many identified other crises as paramount. Respondents who said they didn’t have memories of 9/11 said COVID-19, mass shootings and climate change have been the biggest challenges for the U.S. over the last 20 years. « Gen Z would rather leave stuff like that in the past and focus on today’s problems, » Monroe said. Many Muslim and Arab Gen Zers said 9/11 has cast a long shadow over their communities.
