Zoomers don’t need to participate in the previous generation’s self-justifications for their enthusiasm for the Great War on Terror.

Glory to the first responders, and to the brave boys who thought they were defending their country, but to me 9/11 is just the opening scene — the “Gavrilo Princip shoots Archduke Franz Ferdinand” — of the Great War on Terror.

See, I was four when it happened so 9/11 never affected me emotionally, same as the sinking of the Lusitania doesn’t bother anyone alive today.

But I did grow up in the reckoning of these two foreign invasions that were started with much enthusiasm and bloodlust. So 9/11 to me is Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Soldiers killing themselves. An $8T bill, and the Patriot Act.

The death toll, standing at an estimated 897,000 to 929,000, includes U.S. military members, allied fighters, opposition fighters, civilians, journalists and humanitarian aid workers who were killed as a direct result of war, whether by bombs, bullets or fire. 1

An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting 2.

You might say that none of this is new and most Americans now consider the war a mistake, so what am I on about? And anyways, George Bush and his cabinet tricked the nation into the war by inventing Saddam’s WMD’s, so it’s not our fault!

Did you know the Germans who lived through WWII broadly tried to bury it and move on? One of their many lines was that Hitler tricked them all.

It was really their children who started all the activism about the widespread national complicity in atrocities and the holocaust. It makes sense, the next generation has no need to participate in the previous generation’s self-exculpation, and in fact gain power from righteously attacking their parents.

The point I’m getting at is that for us Zoomers, we have no complicity in the wars after 9/11, but we see all the consequences. I wonder, will the Zoomers attack the previous generation’s failure to reckon with the destruction both to ourselves and the Middle East?

Or will the wars ultimately be ignored, because it happened so long ago and a few trillion dollars and the deaths of an enormous amount of Muslims is ultimately not relevant to our domestic culture and politics?

I don’t know. Probably the latter though.

  1. https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar#:~:text=The%20death%20toll,clean%20drinking%20water. ↩

  2. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/papers/how-death-outlives-war ↩