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posted: September 11, 2026
tl;dr: My memories of 9-11 and some of the ways it changed the world...
As my father said it would at the time, 9-11 changed the world. Here are my recollections of that fateful day.
At the time I was between jobs at Oresis Communications and Copper Mountain Networks. In fact, one of the reasons I joined Copper Mountain Networks was that startup and job opportunities were scarce in the recession that followed 9-11, but that decision would come later. I was up early, and drove to the RiverPlace Athletic Club in downtown Portland, along the banks of the Willamette, for an early workout.
Podcasts had not been invented yet, and I had not yet given up listening to NPR News on the FM radio in my car. Years later I would give up listening to NPR and consuming any media source that got the origin of COVID-19 (and so much else about the pandemic) wrong, but in 2001 NPR News was still the easiest way to get an idea of what was happening in the world. I remember two segments in particular. President George W. Bush was launching his immigration reform initiative, which would include a pathway to citizenship or some form of legal status for illegal immigrants already in the country. We have a lot more of these folks now, but we had them back in 2001 also. After 9-11 this initiative would be abandoned.
The second NPR segment I remember was the latest anti-Bush screed by commentator and columnist Molly Ivins. Ivins hated her fellow Texan, I think this time she was making fun of his accent or the way he pronounced certain words. After 9-11 Bush’s popularity would soar as the country united and rallied around the President. The Left’s hatred of Republican presidents is nothing new, Trump Derangement Syndrome is nothing new, and the constant comparisons to Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party are nothing new. In the Left’s view Reagan was Hitler, the Bushes were Hitler, Trump is Hitler, and if J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, or Ron Desantis wins the 2028 presidential election, he will become Hitler too. It’s all so tiresome, and says infinitely more about the person making the analogy than it does about the person being analogized.
I dressed for my workout, and by the time I got to the gym floor the TVs were tuned to images of the World Trade Center North Tower burning. It wouldn’t be until later that a video would surface of the plane hitting the north tower, but eyewitness accounts and the large plane-shaped hole in the north side of the tower made it clear that a plane had flown into the tower. This wasn’t the first time that a plane had flown into a New York City skyscraper, it happened in 1945 to the Empire State Building, so an accident seemed the most probable cause. All that changed as I, and millions of others, watched the second plane fly into the south tower. “That’s no accident” I immediately thought.
I finally made it to the World Trade Center memorial in December, 2024
Speculation among the TV commentators eventually changed to who might be responsible for this terrorist attack? Several possibilities were discussed, but the answer to me seemed obvious: the same people who had tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 with a bomb in the garage. This was the Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda, led by the shadowy Osama bin Laden, whom the U.S. had tried to kill during the Bill Clinton administration. So we were now at war with Al Qaeda, I concluded. I finished my workout and went home.
Besides the loss of life in the terrorist attacks, and now being at war, there were several aspects of the situation that bothered me tremendously as an engineer. It is not easy to construct 100+ story buildings and to build commercial jetliners, as it takes very advanced science and engineering. Only a few societies and civilizations have managed to do so. In 2026 China still doesn’t have a 100% domestically developed jetliner. There are skyscrapers in China, and the Burj Dubai is the world’s tallest, but the architectural firm that designed these buildings was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago. These can be viewed as capstone achievements of Western civilization. There are plenty of other civilizations that cannot build these creations. But it doesn’t take much advanced science or engineering to sneak some box cutters past airport security, slice some throats, and fly a plane into a building. 9-11 truly was a battle of civilizations.
The other thing that bothered me, when I learned how the planes had been hijacked, was how easy it would have been to prevent 9-11 in the first place. There were many actions taken after 9-11 to beef up security, and all U.S. commercial airplane passengers still have to endure TSA screening to this day. But all it would have taken was the change made to the cockpit door and the procedures for entering and leaving the cockpit. Prior to 9-11 cockpit doors were flimsy, were occasionally left open, and kids were sometimes shepherded up front to meet the pilots. There was an assumption that the passengers could be trusted. After 9-11 cockpit doors were changed to solid steel doors with substantial locks, with strict rules about when the doors could be opened and when they had to be closed. So for a few thousand dollars on a multi-million dollar aircraft, the 9-11 hijacking scenario could have been prevented.
We still are suffering the aftereffects of 9-11. Obviously it led to the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continued U.S. military presence in the Middle East. But there is another chain of events that it kicked off. 9-11 put the U.S. on high alert for subsequent terrorist attacks. It was closely followed by the anthrax attacks. These attacks convinced Bush, Dick Cheney and Congress that the U.S. had to beef up its biodefense, biosecurity, and bioweapons programs, so they gave Anthony Fauci extra powers and money to do so. Virologists then developed gain-of-function techniques to make viruses more deadly to humans. Fauci decided, for reasons that I will forever criticize, to give this technology to the Chinese. And in 2019 the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, causing a pandemic that killed millions.
My father was right: 9-11 did change the world, and not for the better.