Where Were You?

Prior to this day sixteen years ago, I often wondered what my generation would consider their defining moment.  My parents generation had shining moments like the Moon Landing and Woodstock and Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech on the national mall, and they had tragic moments like the assassination of JFK, RFK and MLK, Nixon resigning, and of course the long running tragedy of the Vietnam war.  Prior to September 11, 2001, the closest thing I could come up with to a generation-defining moment was the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding, and that seemed kind of sad, because it seemed sort of like the atrophy of the triumphs that had come before.  It was a space program that had lost steam, making a desperate plea for relevance or at least publicity by sending a school teacher into space. And it literally blew up in their face because of shoddy maintenance and faulty materials.
Then we got our definition.  Then we got the moment that we all have burned into our memory, then we got the tragedy that brought us together for a moment.  It was unbelievable to watch those towers burn and fall.  I had been to the top of the World Trade Center on a field trip in school, those two black monoliths were a defining characteristic of the New York skyline, and in a matter of hours, they were no more, and thousands of people were lost in the ruins and rubble.
The legacy of that day has been a mixed bag.  It has involved us in a seemingly unending war in Afghanistan, it has led us into conflict based on bad information, it has given us, for better or worse, a new villain to fight.  It gave us a moment to be heroes; the firefighters and first-response personnel that went into that cloud of dust on this day were powerful emblems of our better angels. What has happened since still does not dim the power of that moment.
But those events opened the door up to the jingoism and warmongering that was one of our worst faults since WWII. Fighting the Nazis made us feel like a hammer, and ever since then everything looks like a nail: for a long time it was Communists, now it is Al Quaeda, ISIS, the Taliban and whatever comes next.  Honestly, it feels a lot like playing that game Whack-a-Mole on the boardwalk, where the little heads pop out of the hole and you have to try and beat them with a big padded thumper.  From what we have learned about the enemy that orchestrated those attacks over the past 16 years, this was pretty much their plan: provoke us, draw us out and wear us thin, show the world that the imperialist and decadent West was immoral and bent towards the destruction of the true faith.  My question, pretty much every year on this day revolves around how we have and have not played right into that plan.
I know enough about the late Osama Bin Laden to know that he did not expect that the United States would simply tremble in fear and go away.  He did not expect four planes to bring down an empire, he knew that it would take years, decades maybe, and he probably also expected that he would not survive to see it.  Picking up the rubble and moving on was not a surprise to those who planned this attack, nor was the violent response and protracted military response,  The goal was not to break our spirit, but to show that our spirit was as twisted, materialistic and violent as they said it was.  Many wise voices told us this very soon after the smoke cleared, we did not listen as deeply as we ought have.
A generation of children, barely old enough to remember 9-11-2001 are now fighting and dying, accumulating scars and trauma that will be with them forever.  The cost of that day is still being paid.
I'm hoping though that this younger generation will get a better "big event" to hold on to.  We haven't been back to the Moon in a while, maybe it's time to visit there again.