We’ve all got our recollections of 9/11…I was teaching at East Carolina #OTD 24 years ago and was driving there, listening to the radio, when I heard. A few months before this date in 2001, WUNC had gone from a format weighted heavily toward classical music to one of all news and human interest via National Public Radio. It was a telling, almost prescient adjustment. As I drove toward Greenville from Chapel Hill I was listening to the standard fare and somewhere just before the traffic mess that was the approach to Wilson in those days I grew bored and in search of outrage switched over to loudmouth Don Imus. I was ‘there’ when the news hit. At the 1:42 mark of this YouTube the news comes in:
This very broadcast starkly highlights a Before and During narrative as by telephone a friend of Imus’ recounts what he’s seeing from his bedroom window 7 blocks from the World Trade Towers. It is revelatory. To hear it again is chilling to the bone.
Of course I was stunned - then I dialed back to WUNC and the reporting. At a stoplight in Wilson a pick-up pulled beside me - we were both listening to the radio. I looked over at the baseball-capped, mustached driver. He looked back and gave me a huge shoulder shrug. The light turned green. I’m a Historian so as I drove I turned to trying to suss out the significance of the day — September 11.
I study Latin America and while I’m not by any means a stickler for dates, I remembered that 9-11-73 marked the death of Salvador Allende, the president of Chile. My love of Eduardo Galeano’s ‘The Open Veins of Latin America’ had seared those events into my brain. Allende had crossed the USA and Nixon and Kissinger by being a socialist in “our backyard” during the Cold War as well as insisting on market prices for copper (Deemed an essential at the time by the US Military Industrial Complex because of The Vietnam War). Despite his legitimate election in a nation with, at that time at least, a strong tradition of Constitutional Democratic Republicanism and fair elections, our CIA and State Department turned toward Allende’s overthrow. On September 11, 1973 that effort succeeded and a pro-USA military dictatorship was installed and Allende died in what has been ‘ruled’ a suicide. Chile suffered a terrorist government at the hands of “our son of a bitch” (one of many generated by Cold War anti-communism) General Augusto Pinochet for the next 16 years.
So that shot through my mind but was quickly slid to the back as the news pointed more and more conclusively to the Middle East. Just the same I can’t say that I didn’t also reflect on 1995 and Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City. He had proven to anyone that was open to broader thinking that we had citizens and citizen movements within the nation who were capable and sufficiently motivated to murder wantonly to bring down our own Republic in the name of their deranged rightist worldview. But it turned out, as we all know, that a different brand of conservative thinking lay behind 9/11, this one rooted in a zealous, fundamentalist misinterpretation of a different sacred text, ‘The Koran.’
So now we’ve come back around. April 19, 1995 to January 6, 2021. That’s 26 years. It’s 51 years since Chile, 1973. I realize we are all pondering a 23 year span of time today…I guess the historian in me has to stretch it out and seek both farther back, and afield, for antecedents and causation. Many more than the 3,000 innocents, in the towers, and engaged in rescue efforts, perished on September 11 and in the long, long aftermath…many, many.
And now, in 2025, it seems that yet another tragic and violent shadow has been thrown over this fateful day. As with almost any day in these times at a school in Evergreen, Colorado a student opened fire with a pistol on his classmates, wounding two, and then turned the gun on himself, ending his life. In Utah a social media influencer was shot and killed by a sniper — at a school — while speaking to a crowd.
I can’t help but think, given Chile 9/11/73, Oklahoma City 4/19/95, and Washington DC 1/6/21, and the ever-present and daily gunning down of innocents that there’s a Big Picture we’re missing. I can’t put my finger on it, I can’t do more than try and piece together a larger understanding. I figure this essay — on this day of all days — will probably not be a popular one among the homages rightfully written and delivered for the dead, plenty of them so heroic in their demise. It won’t go noticed to be sure. I’ve always struggled with the larger story into which 9/11 lies though. Clearly I still am. Looking at where things stand today there is one thing I believe I can project. Were Timothy McVeigh and Osama Bin Laden alive today the events of January 6, 2021 would have made them both smile Putinesquely.