ArcaMax

Like most Americans who were adults on Sept. 11, 2001, my life is divided into "before" and "after" 9/11.

I awoke to a phone call from a friend at the airport, where her flight had been canceled, and turned on the TV just a few minutes before the second plane hit the World Trade Center towers.

At some point, I woke up my now-husband, and we went to a friend's house to watch CNN for the rest of the day.

Someone immediately suggested dropping bombs on Afghanistan, for the media had made it quickly apparent that it was the Taliban, the leaders of their nation, that was sheltering the responsible parties.

"No, we should drop food on them," I said (and meant it). If they hate us this much and are that impoverished, I thought then, we could do more good by providing aid than we could by waging war.

Now I look back and realize how naive I must have sounded, how hilarious of a capitulation Osama bin Laden would have viewed such a move by the United States. I also know how such a suggestion would have been viewed by those in power then, how namby-pamby it would have sounded. The Netflix documentary "American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden" recounted how former President George Bush immediately demanded blood.

"When we're through with them," J. Cofer Black, CIA director, allegedly assured Bush, "they will have flies walking across their eyeballs."

Not only was Black wrong about the whole eyeballs thing, but it would take another U.S. president and nearly 10 years to merely kill the ringleader of the operation behind 9/11. Far from being allowed to decay in the open air anywhere near bothersome insects, bin Laden was wrapped in a clean sheet and buried at sea, slid into the North Arabian Sea off the USS Carl Vinson after being given proper Islamic funeral rites.

In the meantime, what would be termed "the War on Terror" claimed the lives of at least 8,000 U.S. military members and civilian defense contractors, more than 100,000 Afghani and Iraqi civilians and untold hundreds of thousands of victims of malnutrition, preventable disease, failed infrastructure and mass displacement related to the effort.

In exchange for those lives, the world got what, exactly? Did terrorism end? Did we forcibly install democracies or friendly governments in the countries we invaded? Does anyone like us even a bit more than they did before? What -- apart from the surreal airport security measures in which we apparently will never again walk through a checkpoint wearing shoes -- has changed?

It is impossible to know what would have happened had we responded with weakness instead of strength, and perhaps events did, truly, unfold in the way that was least damaging to those here and abroad.

I don't claim to have those answers.

And I have learned, a quarter of a century later through a journey over the bumpy ground of life, that ignorant optimism is typically best reserved for children and purchasers of lottery tickets. That was a lesson taught to me, in part, on Sept. 11, 2001.

But I do wonder what timeline we would be living in now had we not immediately attacked Afghanistan. And I have also learned in my decades on Earth that occasionally, responding with grace instead of righteous vengeance can yield surprising results.

I also, though, think a lot about someone I used to know, a man who once attended meetings of a group of local writers. He told us the first time he met us that he was writing to gain clarity about a loss.

His wife, he told us, had died in one of the planes on 9/11.

He once read aloud in a group meeting a piece he'd written about the day of Sept. 11, how coworkers at his law firm had shown up at his house to tell him that his wife had been killed. He went upstairs and noticed the book on his wife's bedside, a guide on how to get pregnant.

It was the most tragic piece of writing I have ever experienced.

Afterward, the other members of our group struggled to respond. Critique was impossible, unnecessary.

The events that day broke him, and though he tried mightily to work through his grief, it and mental health challenges eventually took him, making him another victim of 9/11.

It occurred to me later that he was one in hundreds of thousands -- millions, maybe -- touched by the waves that rippled out over fearsome waters in the wake of Sept. 11.

We could not have undone his suffering. And justice might have meant a million different things to the millions of people with a stake in the conversation.

It's hard to look at Sept. 11, 2001, and think merely, "I don't know," but any other answer seems facile and trite.

We had to do something, and something is what we did. Any other conclusions we must release, along with the innumerable souls lost that day, to the great unknown.

I know only this: May they all rest in peace, for we cannot.

COPYRIGHT 2026 GEORGIA GARVEY

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Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate Inc.