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There are moments in history that embed themselves not just in the mind, but in the marrow. They live in the body as a phantom limb, an ache that returns with a change in the weather or the angle of the autumn light. For me, and for so many of my generation, September 11, 2001, is such a moment. I still remember that day with a clarity that sends a chill down my spine, a visceral recollection of a world breaking in real time. On this anniversary, I find myself reflecting not just on the trauma of that day, but on the dissonant paths we have traveled since—paths of breathtaking creation, and paths of breathtaking hatred. It is a 360-degree picture of humanity: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The bad began, as it so often does, on a perfectly ordinary morning. Tuesday, September 11, 2001, started like any other weekday. We got the boys up, had breakfast, and sent the oldest two off to school. The youngest was off to a playdate with a handful of other three-year-olds, his mom in tow. He was excited. The sun was bright. The temperature was not too hot. My day looked to be fairly easy as well. A large electronics show had arrived in Atlanta, and as a journalist, my job was to cover it. I already had my media badge, so I took my time, dealing with office issues before heading downtown.
Traffic inbound was heavy as normal. As I got on the Interstate, the radio station was playing a song, then commercials. Then the morning crew came on the air, asking what seemed at the time like a very strange question: “How could an airplane pilot not avoid running into the tallest building in the world?” It wasn’t quite 9:00. The assumption was that a small, single-engine private plane had hit the tower. There were laughs, jokes, and hopes that no one was seriously injured. What was already a monumental event in New York hadn’t quite registered 800 miles away.
Then, at 9:03, with almost every network camera in the world trained on the Twin Towers, the unimaginable happened: United Airlines flight 175 banked sharply and flew directly into floors 77 through 85 of the South Tower. The radio was silent; not because of a lost connection, but because no one in the control room could assemble words. When the lead DJ finally composed himself, he haltingly managed to get out, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know what’s going on, but a full-sized airliner just plowed into the South Tower.” He paused. “This couldn’t have been an accident.”
In 2001, not everyone on the planet had a cell phone. My employer paid for mine, which allowed me to pay for my wife’s. I called her immediately. When she answered, I said, “I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but someone just attacked the Twin Towers in New York. Grab the baby, then go to the school and get the boys. Go home, and stay in the basement.” My next call was to a DJ I knew at the station. The instant she answered, she said, “I know what you’re about to ask, and no, we still don’t know any answers, but it sure as hell looks like we’re at war. We just don’t know with who.”
I kept driving. So did almost everyone else on the interstate. The Downtown Connector was as jammed as ever, but the atmosphere had changed. No one was singing along with the radio. Expressions were grim. I saw one woman visibly crying. When I made it downtown, I made what I thought was a smart decision and parked across from the Georgia World Congress Center at CNN’s headquarters. It was closer to the entrance. It proved to be a profoundly stupid move.
By the time I made it onto the exhibition floor, the event was already dying. A primary sponsor, headquartered on the 86th floor of the North Tower, had shut down its booth. Their employees were still milling about, shell-shocked, waiting for information about friends and colleagues in New York, including their CEO. None of their calls were going through. The show floor was filled with people, but it was eerily quiet. Attendees were crowded around the few large television screens broadcasting the news from across the street. We all just stared, watched, and began to feel the ache in our chests as the realization of what was happening became frighteningly clear.
The horrors never seemed to end. The FAA grounded all flights. The Pentagon was attacked. The South Tower collapsed. The E-Ring of the Pentagon collapsed. The North Tower collapsed. Word came of the plane in Pennsylvania. Then, an announcement came over the loudspeakers that CNN headquarters, the tall building directly across the street where my car was parked, was a suspected target. Downtown was being evacuated. The restrooms were full of people who had become sick from watching the disaster. Some had fainted. Others were hysterical. The required safety personnel were completely overwhelmed.
At 3:30 that afternoon, the event was officially closed. I did a couple more interviews, took pictures of the empty show floor, and headed for the entrance, hoping I could talk my way to my car. I couldn’t. I had to sit inside the now-darkened World Congress Center and wait. The CNN car park was finally cleared at 6:00. I dumped everything in the trunk and left. Downtown was silent. The Connector was the closest to empty I’d ever seen it. I drove home with the radio turned off. I knew what I needed to know for the night. Everything else could wait.
That day of destruction, of humanity at its worst, set the stage for the two decades that followed: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the performative attack on Afghanistan before the meaningless, disastrous pivot to Iraq, and the long, bloody quagmire that followed. We have not learned. Religious intolerance is at an all-time high. Gun violence has claimed the lives of more children on our own soil than were lost at Ground Zero. We seem determined to magnify the worst parts of ourselves.
And yet, in the years since that day of ruin, a different kind of work has been happening in quiet labs, far from the battlefields. It’s not about dismantling, but about building. It’s about questioning the very code of our existence and wondering if it can be made better. This, I believe, is the “good”—the evidence of what humanity is capable of when it turns its gaze forward, not backward.
Recently, scientists at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology announced they had engineered a bacterium, Syn57, whose genetic code is more efficient than any other lifeform on Earth. For billions of years, all known life has run on a genetic operating system with 64 “commands,” or codons. Scientists long knew that some of these were redundant. After years of painstaking work, altering over 100,000 lines of genetic code, a team at Cambridge created a strain of E. coli that runs on a leaner, more efficient 57-codon system. When asked what the result of this monumental achievement was, the lead researcher had a wonderfully understated and profound answer: “Life still works.”
This raises a breathtaking philosophical question: Who says we can’t “help” nature with our own evolution? If we can understand the fundamental code of life, can we not also improve it? This story represents humanity at its most creative, intelligent, and boundary-pushing. It is a testament to the part of us that seeks to understand, build, and perfect. It is the story of meticulous, patient creation, the absolute antithesis of the chaotic, instantaneous destruction I witnessed on that September morning.
Unfortunately, the opposite is true as well; it has to be. As much as we can move our species forward, we can take ourselves backward. And this is the “ugly.” It is the impulse not to improve the human code, but to corrupt it, to rewrite the code of a nation to be more exclusionary and primitive.
Last Tuesday, Eric Schmitt, a sitting United States Senator from Missouri, stood before the National Conservatism Conference and delivered a speech that was a direct revolt against Abraham Lincoln. Where Lincoln, at Gettysburg, spoke of a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Schmitt proposed a different vision. America, he declared, is not a nation of ideals. It is a “white homeland.”
“Our ancestors… built this country for us,” he said. “It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.” He defined “us” as the “sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores.” He celebrated the destruction of Native Americans as a victory of those “superior in strength and perseverance”—a vision of fascist natural selection. He deployed classic antisemitic tropes of “elites… who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere,” blaming them for a “deracinated ideological creed” that seeks to strip America of its racial foundation.
This is the language of blood-and-soil nationalism. It is an ideology that defines a nation not by its shared laws and ideals, but by its shared ethnicity and faith. As I listened to this rhetoric, I found myself asking a chilling question: Is it incorrect to state that giving in to these concepts is reducing us to the moral equivalent of Iran, China, Russia, and the current Israeli government? All are regimes defined by the enforcement of one belief system, one ethnic identity, over a piece of land, often violently. They are all expressions of the same core idea: the rejection of a pluralistic, civic nationalism in favor of a purified, tribal one.
The Slate article that reported on this speech noted, with chilling accuracy, that a sitting U.S. senator could make such a speech “without shame or pushback by his party,” highlighting how mainstream this ugly vision has become.
So on this anniversary of 9/11, I find myself caught between these three poles. I carry the traumatic memory of a day when an external enemy, fueled by religious intolerance and tribal hatred, brought destruction to our shores. I see the breathtaking hope of a future where humanity’s genius can literally perfect the code of life itself. And I am confronted with the ugly reality of a powerful movement from within that seeks to embrace the very same kind of tribal, intolerant, blood-and-soil thinking that fueled the attacks in the first place. The threat is no longer just a plane from outside; it is a poison in our own body politic. The great challenge of our time is to decide which path we will follow: the path of the scientist, seeking to build a more perfect future, or the path of the nationalist, seeking to retreat into a more purified and much uglier past.
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