the newspapers of september 11th-12th, 2001
The school sent us home early, of course. Did I mention this is another personal essay about 9/11? Should be obvious from the title. It is, sorry.
I remember coming home and seeing the newspaper on the table. Growing up in Virginia, my family always had daily home delivery of The Washington Post. Through breakfast, it would get spread out across the entire table. I read sports and comics, of course. The Post had four entire pages of comics every day, which they then condensed into three pages without cutting any. It ruled.
The paper from September 11th was shocking. Not for any banner headline, of course; no, that was the newspaper from the next day. The newspaper from September 11th was completely normal, indistinguishable from any other paper from the preceding era. It was an instant time capsule. The TV is on in the other room (on CNN, not that it mattered, since every channel had the same things airing), but here in an outdated paper was a portal to another world where this wasn’t happening, one with entirely different, now irrelevant, issues.
I knew, intellectually, that the newspaper wouldn’t update itself in real time; I was 12 and had developed object permanence slightly before that. But back then, it seemed like if a news event happened, it could wait until the next morning to find out about it. (People who were old enough to experience the OJ trial as it happened might disagree, but that trial was mostly entertainment.) 9/11 was the first time the news couldn’t wait a day.
September 12th’s paper was in two different sections: one that led with the biggest banner headline of the era and that image of the second plane about to hit the tower, and one that didn’t. A lot of content in a newspaper is written (or at least worked on) more than a day in advance, of course, and non-time sensitive stuff is just slotted in whenever. So the Washington Post had an entirely separate mini-newspaper of everything they had worked on that now didn’t matter in the slightest. Two newspapers for two different possible realities: one where the attacks happened, one where it didn’t.
Once my mom wasn’t crying, she was in the dining room reading that section of the September 12th paper. I think she read some of it the next day, too.
At the time, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to engage with the newspaper reality of what happened. It was immediately obvious how important it was; why did she want to bury her head in the sand?
Now, I understand a lot more. In an age where every day brings more hellish news about the Trump administration attempting genocide in a new way, or the upcoming extinction of humanity due to climate change, there’s no way for anyone to constantly surround themselves with all that misery and remain a functional member of society. And there’s no honor in submerging yourself in that. In my worse moments, I get mad at other Magic players or assorted nerds for ignoring the world around them in favor of a meaningless game, but why? People still need their outlets even when everything sucks.
It can feel impossible to enjoy pretty much anything nowadays without feeling in some way guilty about it. My favorite album of 2018 was produced by idiot Trump fan Kanye West. I’ll probably get Red Dead Redemption 2 eventually, since the first was one of my favorite games of all time, and I’ll try not to think about the horrific exploitation of their workers that led to the creation of the game. And almost any major music, or games, or movies, are released by horrible mega-conglomerates who are working tirelessly to get more Trumps in office so they can get new tax cuts.
But the world doesn’t get better because you feel like shit about what you enjoy. Read whichever newspaper from September 11th or 12th you want, and the world moves on regardless.
