Twenty-five years ago. Thirty percent of Americans alive today were born after 9/11/01. Another seven percent were five years old or younger, too young to remember.

As one of these post 9/11 babies said, “Dafry, 21, who lives in the Bronx, seems more confused. He admits he does not know much about what happened then—only that someone hijacked planes and crashed them, but he is not sure into what. “It was against the Empire State Building, right?” he asks. When told it was actually the Twin Towers, he replies that he had heard something but wasn’t sure. “Sorry, I’m a bit disconnected,” he apologizes. He does know, however, that the attacks changed many things, especially airport security. “It’s crazy. It happened 25 years ago and people still get emotional and keep talking about it,” he concludes.

Here are some reasons why, Dafry

When the second plane hit we all knew it wasn’t a coincidence.

Photographers, occupied with images of the first tower, were prepared when the second tower was struck.

Falling Man. Perhaps the most gripping image from that day. Rather than burn alive, people jumped to their deaths.

My father was never close to his family. His sister Adelaide had two daughters, one of whom was Mary Jane, the secretary to the president of American Airlines. She was officially my cousin, although I didn’t know her. She boarded Flight #77 for San Francisco, but her life ended when that plane flew into the Pentagon. My father died before that day, and my very political uncle Rowland had died a year earlier. I’m glad that neither one of them knew what happened on 9/11.

I took this image in an earlier visit to NY, using a rectilinear fisheye lens to shoot through a sculpture at the base of the World Trade Center towers.

The sixty-three percent of us who were alive then remember where we were at 9 am on that day. Jennifer was in England. She called us at 6 am P.S.T.. Her words were, “Turn your TV on.” No sittings, no senior portraits. We were just witnesses to an Al Quaeda attack on America, fully aware that thousands of our fellow citizens who went to work that morning didn’t come home, almost three thousand of them, a number that has trebled in the years since because rescue workers, firemen, and ordinary citizens breathed the toxic air that hung around for months. In the last couple of days it has been revealed that the city of New York knew that the air was unhealthy and failed to alert those who had to breathe it.

For those who are in their late fifties, most will agree that 9/11 signifies their most traumatic memory. We all remember where we were, what we were doing, how we learned about the attacks. The memory imprints events like this with permanent ink.

For those of us who are older, who came of age in the sixties, it might take a back seat to Kennedy’s assassination, followed by both King’s and Robert Kennedy’s. In fact the whole decade is one linked memory of turmoil and change—the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations, hippies, free love, the democratic convention in Chicago, the Weatherman, Yippies, SDS, Charles Manson, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Vietnam War, the peripatetic draft notifications, Nixon’s dirty tricks, and the Black Panthers, all fused together in a very memorable stew. When my peers are asked, “What was the most dramatic event you remember?”the likely answer is “The Sixties.”

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

The Sixties, 9/11, may not be the last catastrophes facing America in our lifetimes. Last night Donald Trump asked of the attendees at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas:

“Please raise your right hand,” Mr. Trump instructed a rowdy crowd of thousands inside a Dallas arena on Thursday evening. Many of them complied. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” (Mr. Trump usually frowns on election fraud.)

He added: “I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3.”

What’s been left unmentioned in this blog entry is January 6, 2021, when Trump incited an insurrection against the USA, resulting in the deaths of not only several people, but democracy itself. With MAGA in attendance last night, a stream of election deniers in power, Trump is attempting to create an authoritarian regime paying obeisance only to himself, arguably the most stupid, corrupt person in America. The midterm elections are coming in two months. He just announced that he will cheat in the election. If he can he will. If he wins, 9/11 will take a back seat to an America that will be steeped in cruelty, authority, and hatred, his personal way of making America “Great” Again.