Just as our parents will forever remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was shot and our
grandparents will remember where they were when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we will never forget what we were doing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Many politicians talk about how we now live in a Sept. 12 world, as though in one day the world changed fundamentally. In some ways, it did. As Americans, we feel less secure than we did before the shocking terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. As college students, we take greater interest in studying the Middle East, Arabic, Islam and terrorism. As young people, we seek the comforts of home, even as we assert our independence.
Almost four years after the attacks, we often take these changes for granted. The Daily’s series on the impact of 9/11 received no responses from student readers.
Could it be because already we have internalized the changes taking place in our lives and we no longer feel compelled to discuss how and why things changed?
I’m not so sure. The idea for the series took shape more than six months ago after I spoke with two other students in front of the editorial advisory board for Northwestern magazine.
Among other things, we discussed students’ increased interest in studying abroad and participating in activities with an emphasis on global events and issues since Sept. 11, 2001. That conversation prompted an intriguing question: How else have students’ lives changed as a result of the terrorist attacks?
When the rest of the Class of 2005 and I entered NU in fall 2001, Sept. 11 was still a fresh wound on our collective conscience. In the next few years, we caught glimpses of how things changed through news stories, lectures and class discussions. But nothing brought the big picture into focus.
Before Winter Break, I sat down with two other senior Daily editors to brainstorm ideas for a series of stories and photos that would do just that. We settled on six broad topics: academics, study abroad, the military and ROTC, coping, post-graduation plans and race and religion.
Our reporters found that students and faculty were more than willing to talk about the influences of Sept. 11 — they were excited. We expected readers of the series would be excited to talk about the issues, too.
The resulting project was published over the past six days. And not once during those six days or the weekend in the middle did anyone from the NU community write a letter to the editor in response.
Usually when that happens at The Daily, the staff assumes that either no one read the stories or people weren’t interested enough to respond. Sometimes receiving no letters is just a sign that no major errors occurred.
In this case, some people who read the series talked to Daily staffers about it. The stories also received a significant number of hits on The Daily’s Web site.
Whether or not people write letters to the editor in response the series, our generation will continue talking about Sept. 11 long after we graduate from college. We have learned to live with the realities of life in a Sept. 12 world. But we won’t forget what came before.
We will tell our stories in our own way, like our parents and grandparents before us.
Former Daily Editor in Chief Elaine Helm coordinated “The 9/11 Effect.” The Medill senior can be reached at
