A Quarter of a Century Later

I was five years old, sitting on a dark green shag carpet in my home in Winnipeg, witnessing the television the way everyone else was. My mother was pregnant with my little brother, and she wondered how she could bring another life into a world where something like this could happen. I was born in the middle of the 1990s, in the middle of the 'peaceful' decade, wedged between the Cold War and the War on Terror. The rise of the early internet made people believe in a connected, peaceful world with open borders and shared knowledge. The United States was understood to be the last remaining global superpower, and citizens felt safe from foreign threats. It took only a handful of men with a plan to irreversibly change that. A sobriety washed over the world, the taste of ash and dust. And we are now distant enough that an entire generation of millions only knows about what happened from archival footage (often age-gated) and textbooks. While there is one generation who only understands the…