Sept. 11 was a foundational event for the Millennial generation. It was an end to childhood — at least the childhood of complete and enveloping safety — and the end of the world our parents expected us to inherit.
The al-Qaida attacks didn’t exactly cause us to fear the world around us. This, to us, was not like Communism to an earlier generation — an all-consuming and relentless enemy that could actually triumph.
Any such illusions vanished quickly, as the Taliban fell, and Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard crumbled. We stopped thinking of terrorism as an existential threat.
If anything, we started to view events in the world as random and disconnected. What happened in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, was unexpected, undeserved, and looks increasingly like an outlier event, at least in its scope and its effect.
If something like this could happen, we started to believe things could, in fact, just happen to us.
But the absence of an implacable external enemy didn’t mean the end of fear for our generation. In fact, the absence of some external force to fear made us more introspective, more willing to entertain doubts, sometimes about the world around us, but more often about our own capabilities.
The great terror of our generation is not annihilation, but irrelevance. We don’t fear some foreign enemy, but the dawning certainty that our lives cannot be as grand as we were promised.
We have prepared, many of us, since childhood to live magnificent lives. We are the groomed generation, the connected generation, the Organization Kids, as New York Times' columnist David Brooks called us.
Our parents largely cared about us, society itself was structured to our benefit, and great things were expected of us.
We are unsettled, now. Maybe you can pin it to Sept. 11, maybe it was something unavoidable, the inevitable backlash against the idea that each generation would live better than the one before it, no matter what.
Maybe it was inevitable that a generation that grew up hearing how wonderful it was would disappoint. Maybe the “cult of self-esteem” was as pernicious as some are beginning to fear.
So we move on in our lives, to high school and college and the beginnings of careers, with the sense that we may be struggling to enter a system that doesn’t need us, or doesn’t want us, or can’t take us.
This is not wholly a political feeling, but the politics of our parents — with its raised voices and its petty fights and great, unspoken failings — doesn’t help. Neither does the generational reckoning we’re about to face.
The political system we’re about to inherit can’t pay for itself. Increasingly, it seems the mistakes of the past will tie our hands as we enter power.
We always thought the world was made for us, and in many ways, it was. But we’re finding out it may have been made badly, and that we may lack the skills to remake it.
This, not terrorism, or foreign enemies, or imminent war, is our greatest fear.
Reach the columnist at wmunsil@asu.edu. Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
