Kinsey Robinson asked Ryan Smithson:

How bad was 9/11? I've heard about it at school, but I've never quite understood the severity of it.

Ryan Smithson It was bad in the sense that no one thought we were that vulnerable. Terrorists had hijacked planes before, but they usually wanted something in return—prisoners released, money, political asylum, etc. Never in our lifetimes had people used planes as weapons, and never to attack civilian targets. And it wasn’t just one. It was the first tower, which people kind of assumed was an accident. Then the second, which made it obvious it was a coordinated attack. Then one hit the Pentagon. Then another went down before it reached its final target, wherever that was. So imagine as it’s all unfolding, no one knows when it’s going to end. Were there more planes? Was there going to be other forms of attacks—car bombs at rush hour, warheads falling on major cities? It was terrifying, which was the point. Besides the War on Terror, the other lasting effect of 9/11 has been a hyper-fear-driven media. The news has always been grim, but 9/11 taught news organizations that sensationalism can make them lots and lots of money. People became glued to the news after 9/11, because we wanted answers. And that quest has never quite left our society. It created a burgeoning 24/7 cable news industry, which created a “need” to know about everything bad happening all the time, the assumption being that the more we know the better we can prepare and predict—ironically, being scared all the time makes us feel safer. The opposite is true, of course, and unless we’re working in a field whose job it is to prepare and react to emergencies, then infotainment is probably doing us more psychological harm than good. Now this is excluding events like COVID, which really do require us to pay attention and stay informed, using whatever news source we prefer, but this is obviously the exception and not the norm. I think your generation is witnessing an even bigger change in history. Most people, while frightened, didn’t have to change their day-to-day life after 9/11.

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