I invite you to think about that question for a few seconds and let me know if you can come up with a definitive answer.
What did the trained suicide killers and their choreographed slaughter accomplish 20 years ago?
They destroyed the World Trade Center, and the Freedom Tower — 1 World Trade Center with its symbolic 1,776-foot building height — rose in its place.
They turned airplanes into weapons and skyscrapers and symbols of American power like the Pentagon into death zones, and Navy SEALS hunted down and killed their leader.
Today, the Taliban rule Afghanistan just like they did 20 years ago and Americans endure airport security screenings and go about their lives with the knowledge that evil-doers who plotted the 9/11 attacks are looking for ways to mount new attacks.
There have been no repeat attacks on the scale of the ones launched on that flawlessly-blue Tuesday morning. That is cold comfort to the people who loved the victims of the attacks and who endure an abiding sense of loss and a pain that may be dulled by time but never extinguished.
I mark 9/11 every year by remembering Bill Weems, a Marblehead resident who died on one of the planes flown into the World Trade Center. We played together in a tennis league and I remember a gangly guy with a dry sense of humor underscored by a nonchalant expression on his face to counterpoint the many funny things he said.
His forehand was better than mine and I remember the sense of unreality I felt when I found his name engraved, along with hundreds of other names, in the black stone at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.
Tragedy morphing into history has transformed Bill for all of us who knew him from a guy who worked hard and liked to be a father into a name that will endure in a sacred hall of honor.
The Memorial and the Freedom Tower were under construction in 2008 when I visited Ground Zero with my wife and my brother’s family. We boarded a subway train after the visit and my normally-quiet teenage nephew began peppering me with questions about that Tuesday morning.
I answered them but only after cautioning him that we needed to speak in a whisper because people sitting a few feet away from us might have lost someone in the attacks.
Most of the people I work with are less than half my age and I have asked them about their 9/11 memories. One told me about sitting in class in a Connecticut suburb on that Tuesday as her school loudspeaker summoned kids who had lost a parent in the attacks to the principal’s office.
Again, I return to my question: What did the attackers and their backers hope to gain from their assaults? The suicide killers included educated men who must have read enough American history to know we are not a people who will shirk from violence.
We are, in fact, a people forged in violence: We’re a nation of European outcasts purged for their religious beliefs; Africans ripped from their homelands and cast into slavery; Indigenous people brutalized by Manifest Destiny pillage and slaughter, and Asians and Latinos forced into the task of forging that destiny.
The enduring truth about 9/11 is that the attacks left holes that will never be filled in the hearts of thousands of people. For the rest of us who did not suffer intimate losses on that morning, we were perhaps hardened and made more cynical by the terror attacks.
We were also, as a nation, drawn into wars that our politicians and military leaders perpetuated while more Americans buried loved ones killed serving their country. In the end, we may have learned nothing from 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. But like Winston Churchill in World War II’s darkest hours, we will never surrender to terror.
