Remembering 9/11 in 2022

The dark anniversary of the largest terrorist attack in American history looms large every year. Does this year feel different?

Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash.

Those of us who were alive during the devastating terrorist attack on the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, remember exactly where we were that morning.

It was a Tuesday. In New York, as in many other places that year, the morning dawned as beautiful and clear a fall morning as you could have wished. It was like every other September; the air was beginning to cool, with the autumn freshness of fall apples.

School had just started; for most people, their workdays were just getting started, too.

Unbeknownst to any of us in America that day, we were about to witness what philosophers in many ages have noted about the banality of evil.

Evil doesn’t look like a midnight black mass, held by horned devils in a spooky medieval graveyard on Halloween. It wasn’t wearing a William Shatner mask, or a hockey mask; it didn’t have razor blades for fingers. It wasn’t lurking under the bed, or in the attic, or hiding down in the cellar; it wasn’t wearing a mask made of human flesh and wielding a chainsaw.

Instead, evil visited this great nation one sunny morning on a random, idle Tuesday. It was a day like any other. Until it…