Politico’s Garrett Graff interviewed children born on September 11, 2001. They will be eligible to vote in their first presidential election this year:
The children of 9/11 are among the youngest cohort of Americans who will go to the polls this fall—Gen Z voters who came of age in a country that had long since been transformed by the terror attacks.The signature news events of their lives have often been other tragedies—the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when they were 11, and at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, when they were 16. They barely remember the financial crisis of 2008 and many have only the foggiest memories of Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory. Many weren’t even paying that much attention to politics at 15 when Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton upended American politics.
Graff finds these members of Gen Z, “lean left but they include plenty of independents and Trump admirers, too, even as they profess sympathy for Black Lives Matter and same-sex marriage, which has been legal somewhere in the country for nearly half their lives.”
“We haven’t been in a time where we’re at peace,” says biracial Chloe, a medical secretary in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The sense that 9/11 changed everything is palpable:
Hillary: From what I understand, there’s a certain aspect of fear now that didn’t necessarily exist before. It’s weird when I talk to my parents and they say, “This is not what it was always like.”
Aidan: I hear things about pre-9/11 safety and security. I get the gist that people were nicer and people didn’t have to worry about locking your cars or worry about carrying a gun on you or if you were going to go to a movie theater and get shot. It wasn’t even a thought in their head—and now it is.
But so has the pandemic changed things. No traditional graduation, schools closing, memories they won’t have.
Jacob:I don’t know if other people outside of America think of America as being so great, but we’re actually not that great.
Lilly: After 9/11 and living through this pandemic, I’m hoping that our country can continue to stay together as one and not fall apart. I hope that we’ll learn from things like this.
That’s a tough ask even for those of us born into more hopeful times. Naturally, these newly eligible voters have no memory of 9/11. And almost no mention of the climate crisis in these interviews. A couple generations down the road may have no memory of Florida.
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