The 9/11 generation

A century and a half after the French Revolution came to a close, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong was asked for his thoughts on the impact of the upheaval that had shaken the continent. “It is too early to tell,” Chairman Mao famously responded.

Apocryphal or not, Mao’s response touched on what makes enormous moments so elusive: Though we know when a moment is formative and definitive, we lack the clarity or perspicacity to comprehend it until decades or even centuries clear of its wake. We know it has changed us but not quite how we have changed.

Ten years after attacks that challenged the foundation of American political and social life, it remains unclear what legacy lies behind for the generation that was buried and arose in its ruins. The 9/11 generation cannot define itself because the generation is still growing, still grappling and still grieving. The generation remains in the moment, unable to separate its coming-of-age from its day-to-day routine. It is still too early to tell.

Interviews with current Princeton undergraduates, though, send the signal that, although we cannot detach ourselves and objectively observe our own identity, we do know that we still tremble in its power. Current students, who mostly ranged in age from 7 to 12 during the time of the attacks — the age range that many scholars have labeled as the most profoundly affected by the attacks — have been undoubtedly marked and scarred by its destruction.

Princeton students’ attachments and responses to the casualties varied. To some students, the attacks were a distant event with unknown victims and far-from-home consequences. To others, the attacks stole family members, redirected careers and repositioned identities. Yet 10 years after 9/11, it is clear that no Princeton student was spared from its fallout.

Dillon Reisman ’14, Zach Sobel ’13, Jihad al-Jabban ’14, Madigan Stanley ’13 and Jack Greisman ’14 all reacted differently to 9/11 because they had different connections to the attacks. Reisman cried as he lost a father. Sobel emerged confident in a greater purpose. Jabban took on a mission to protect his identity. Stanley watched terror envelop her country while Greisman watched panic envelop his city. Yet for all their differences, their stories compose the fabric of the Princeton’s reaction to tragedy, demonstrating that no one can escape the physical, emotional, or generational damage of September 11, 2001.

Losing a Father

It was not unusual for Frank Reisman, 41, to come home late from work. It was not unusual for him to be late to dinner, or even to miss it entirely. But when Dillon Reisman laid in bed on the night of Sept. 11, he knew that something was not quite right.

His mother had told him that his father was still at work. There had been an “accident,” Reisman was told. Though he was conscious that his father had not come home that night — which was peculiar — he did not suspect much. “He is still at work,” Reisman thought.

But as friends and neighbors began to visit their house in Princeton to pay their condolences, Reisman began to connect the pictures on the news broadcasts with the realization that he had not seen his father in days. He knew.

His mother spent the next couple of days furiously calling nearly every hospital in the tri-state area in search of her husband. But even 9-year-old Dillon knew that his father, who worked as a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower, stood little chance of ever joining them for dinner once more.

On Friday, Sept. 14, 2001, Dillon was called into the living room and was told that his father had died.

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“As soon as I walked into the living room and saw [my mother and sister] there my mom didn’t have to say anything. I knew what had happened by that point,” Reisman said.

Ten years later, Reisman said that his father’s death continues to frame his memories of his childhood. Though he has managed to dissociate the historical significance of 9/11 from the loss of his father, Reisman said, every photograph of the burning towers triggers an emotional reaction.

When Osama bin Laden was killed this spring, for instance, college campuses erupted in jubilation, celebrating the death of the decade’s ultimate villain. For many students without a direct connection the attacks, bin Laden’s death was a fulfilling closure and an impetus to finally move forward. But for Reisman, the death was just another reminder of things past.

“The world is a better place with him dead and I was pleased with the fact that he died looking down the barrel of an American gun,” Reisman said. Yet, he cautioned, he “took really no solace in it.”

“All it did was send back more pictures of the World Trade Center, more talk of 9/11. It made us feel like everything had just happened again,” he noted.

The bereaved children of 9/11 perpetually live in the scope and aftermath of the attacks. A study at Cornell followed 45 children who lost a parent in the attacks.Though nearly all the children received extensive counseling, the children were twice as likely to be diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses, such as PTSD and separation anxiety, after the attacks as they were before the attacks.Even those without symptoms of illness, like Reisman, however, still inherit a frame of reference rooted in their tragic loss.

“I think about a lot of things through the lens of my dad’s death. It’s unavoidable. Every significant life event — everything that’s happened —is a reminder that my dad’s not there,” Reisman explained.

This perspective is tough for others to understand, Reisman said. Pain is personal and particular and, while others may sympathize, they can never relate. In sixth grade choir class, Reisman’s classmates told stories of lost pets, which for many students was their first experience with death. Yet Reisman sat silent. “I’m not going to throw my dad’s memory into this petty little fight because that’s so trivializing,” he thought.

Reisman said that he almost goes out of his way not to tell people of his father’s death. Some of his best high school friends were not told until the final weeks of senior year. They had just assumed divorce.

When some of these friends and Reisman were asked on the final day of 11th grade by a teacher whether they felt physically endangered in the 9/11 era, not a single student raised their hand, shocking Reisman, who also hugged his hand to his seat.

“At the back of my head I know it happened, I know it can happen to you, I know it can to one of your family members,” he said. “Not a day goes by when I’m not worrying about one of my family members.”

New Roles for the New Age

When 19 al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four jets and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and an abandoned field in rural Pennsylvania, they probably were not thinking about fifth grader Zach Sobel or fourth grader Jihad al-Jabban. Yet these attacks pulled back the curtain on a new political theater that cast everyone — even elementary school students — in radically different roles.

Catastrophic events such as 9/11 have tendencies to break politics down into false dichotomies that supposedly simplify our world order. Amidst a dramatic domestic wartime effort in 1942, George Orwell wrote that "if you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.” President George W. Bush famously declared nine days after 9/11, to a thunderous joint session of Congress, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Sobel and Jabban occupy these spurious caricatures. Sobel, a member of the University’s ROTC program, is one of the illustrious American soldiers, who won Time Magazine’s 2003 Person of the Year. Jabban, public relations chair of the University’s Muslim Students Association, is a proud member of a group whose coreligionists killed 3,000 Americans.

Though neither portrait of the two students is accurate, they represent the two “sides” of the new world order shaped in the attacks’ aftermath: the offense — the American military — and the defense — the Muslim world. Both are out to prove that this cleavage is misplaced.

Sobel, from Bradenton, Fla., had little personal connection to the attacks. He has no family in New York City. The attacks were surreal. His reaction was detached. At age 11, the horrific images and news reports were “news that [he] heard and understood but didn’t comprehend.”

But while Sobel may have lacked a personal connection to the casualties, he did not lack a personal connection to the American mission that formed in response. Sobel’s family has a long history of military service; he knew since he visited MacDill Air Force Base when he was four that he hoped to eventually serve in the armed forces. After he graduates, Sobel will serve a minimum of four years in the Army through the ROTC program.

When 9/11 struck, Sobel said that his choice of career was not just aligned with what his family needed, but what his country needed too.

“I probably would have joined anyway, but as a thinking individual, [9/11] provides an unbelievable philosophical backdrop for such a crucial life decision,” Sobel said.

So while research shows that the attacks created a surge in recruitment for the military, Sobel does not quite fit the bill of the inspired American who spontaneously dedicated his life to service in the face of great threat. Yet just because 9/11 did not unleash a then-hidden patriotism does not means that it did not serve as a clarion call for people like Sobel.

“If there is going to be perpetual threat to our country, I want to be in a position to deal with that. And that’s one reason I joined the military,” Sobel explained. “9/11 definitely gave every person that wanted to serve or was serving a definite reason behind their choice,” he added.

Like Sobel, Jabban rethought his identity and personhood in the decade following 9/11. But while Sobel thought about and chose his new role in the post-9/11 era, Jabban had little choice; he was forced to adapt to a world that some accuse of being at war with Islam.

Jabban’s reaction to the attacks was immediate and precocious.

“I remember ... coming back home and turning on the news and I remember seeing the word ‘Muslim’ many times when describing the attacks. It was a shocking realization of what was to come,” Jabban said.

Since Sept. 11, there have been 800 incidents of violence against people perceived to be Muslim, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. In Congress, republican representative Peter King has aggressively pursued hearings on what he sees as a radicalization of American Muslims. Being a Muslim in the post-9/11 United States comes with its own challenges.

Over the last 10 years, Jabban has assumed a positive, proactive role in shaping and defeating these challenges. He has embarked on a mission to let his identity shape society’s perception rather than letting society’s perception shape his identity. He is out to show that al-Qaida terrorists are not representative of Islam.

“For me there’s a pre-9/11 era and a post-9/11 era,” Jabban explained. “I didn’t feel it was necessary to act as a real model for Islam [before 9/11]. But after that, without there being too many Muslims ... I agreed to really act as model to other communities about what Muslims are,” he said.

The Muslim community, Jabban argued, could no longer sit quietly and think inwardly. It was now compelled to engage society.

Yet as noble as Jabban’s vision for Muslim pride and identity is, he himself noted that he changed tack to avoid conflict in a fearful world. Jabban, whose first name, Jihad, means “struggle” or “holy war” in Arabic, said that his mother often called him “Jude” in public places to avoid outright discrimination and ridicule. He knew that his first name had become toxic.

“Having to know that my name was being dehumanized and being put out of context and used for fear-mongering is something that is very hurtful and I still have to deal with,” Jabban said.

Reverberations across the Nation

No matter whether we shed tears time zones or blocks away from the terror, we were pierced with emotion. Sept. 11 was an attack on a nation — on ideals, a way of life — not on a city or a region. Even the furthest removed Princetonians felt its tremor.

While terrorists attacked violently along the east coast, Madigan Stanley slept peacefully in Anchorage, Alaska. Yet when she awoke and saw her parents watching television, she knew the day was different. Her parents tried explaining to her what had happened, but she was still in a stage of confusion. This was in New York.

“I had never heard of the twin towers ... New York is pretty much on the opposite side of the world,” Stanley explained. Stanley went to school that day as normal, though some Alaskans did stay home.

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, less than 10 miles from the World Trade Center and across a continent from Alaska, Jack Greisman experienced a far different 9/11. While a couple of Stanley’s classmates didn’t show up to school at all in Anchorage, Greisman’s classmates were picked up by parents seemingly randomly throughout the day. Greisman knew something had happened — the pickups were obviously atypical — but he didn’t know what for much of the day.

But when Greisman stepped outside, it was clear he was in New York City. As he walked home from school with his mother, a series of fighter jets crisscrossed the Manhattan skyline. America had mobilized and Greisman stood at the frontline.

“To see low-flying fighter jets flying over Manhattan was kind of surprising and out of the ordinary,” he remembered. “Those are the sort of things that you kind of remember and are different.”

Greisman is also a staff photographerfor The Daily Princetonian.

Though neither Greisman nor Stanley personally knew anyone who passed away, their experiences illustrate the role of distance in our memories of 9/11. To Stanley, the attacks were “less emotional” and “pretty unreal;” after all, she did not have the tangible connections to the New York City air that smelled of fear. 9/11 was a mediated experience for Stanley, observed through television sets and newspaper columns but not through the roar of fighter jets over 94th Street.

“People, the day of, were pretty scared and shaken up. But I don’t think it was anywhere as near as traumatic or emotional as it would have been in New York,” Stanley noted.

Anchorage, which houses military and air force bases, was replete with flags and a sense of patriotism, Stanley explained, but it was nothing like it was for Stanley’s Princeton roommates from the New York area. So while Stanley explained that it shaped the political world that her generation inherits, she cannot connect to the closeness of the trauma that unfolded on New York City streets. The Big Apple was just a place she had seen photos of.

For Greisman, the Big Apple was home — 9/11 was less of an attack and more of an invasion. As he walked home that Tuesday afternoon, he sensed the panic permeating through the New York air, the unavoidable and pervasive fear that Stanley could never touch. Though the attacks were not immediately “real” to Greisman — it is not easy for a fourth grader to grasp the significance of a terrorist strike — he eventually formed a reaction rooted in his home city. Jack Greisman was a New Yorker.

“It’s really something you can’t forget as a New Yorker. It’s really changed the region and the city itself,” he said. “I’m not sure that there was really the direct effect and direct response to the attack, that that was really something that was felt physically in other parts of the country,” Greisman added.

Princeton students reacted to 9/11 from Anchorage, Alaska, New York and a myriad of points in between. And while all emotional responses were individual and unique, the collection of reactions illustrates the omnipresence of tragedy and omnipotence of grief.

It is impossible to compare the 9/11 experience of Dillon Reisman with the 9/11 experience of Madigan Stanley. They exist on radically incomparable scales.

But as a wider narrative, the combination of their stories shows that no University student was invincible — we all took pains. We all were changed. While 9/11 is just a rough date for some of us but an agonizing memory for others, it is clear that there is no student who escaped unharmed. Even if we did not know it led to us a certain career, it did. Even if we did not know it reshaped our identities, it did. Some impacts resembled fighter jets — noisy, obvious and fleeting — while others were like the smoke that could observed from the University’s campus on Sept. 11, 2001 — docile, subdued and fading. But no one escaped unscathed.

Who is the 9/11 generation? It is too early to tell. Until then, we’ll have to settle for being a collection of unearthed stories and unhealed scars, and an unwritten tale.

For more coverage commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11, please click here.