This weekend, on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America will pause. We’ll reflect. We may even share stories with one another in response to the musical question posed by country singer Alan Jackson nearly a decade ago, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).”
I was the editor of Plugged In magazine at the time. When I arrived at work the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, our tiny media room was already packed with people. Plugged In was one of the few departments at Focus on the Family with a television, so colleagues filtered in and out of our cramped workroom pretty much all day long. No one could focus on anything else. Lots of tears, prayers, and stunned stares.
I felt numb, too. Suddenly, reviewing movies and teaching families how to make wise entertainment choices seemed almost trivial. Yet there was a magazine to finish. And work on the first Movie Nights book was in full swing. Still, in the days and weeks that followed, it was hard to muster the same enthusiasm for either.
Eventually, however, the culture analyst in me managed to refocus. It helped that every day we were hearing triumphant stories of faith, courage and social responsibility. Singers were hosting benefit concerts. Hollywood seemed to be having a take-stock moment. And it was refreshing to hear young pop culture connoisseurs wondering aloud if there was more to life than MTV.
“Our generation, as long as we’ve had an identity, was known as the generation that had it easy,” said Greg Epstein, a 24-year-old graduate student. “We had no crisis, no Vietnam, no Martin Luther King, no JFK. We’ve got it now. When we have kids and grandkids, we’ll tell them that we lived through the roaring ’90s, when all we cared about was the No. 1 movie or how many copies an album sold. This is where it changes.”
And for a short time, it did. Sony pulled the Spider-Man trailer featuring a chopper full of bank robbers caught in a web between the Twin Towers. Certain violent movies deemed inappropriate or potentially insensitive had their release dates changed (remember Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage?). Musicians responded quickly with songs celebrating our country rather than tearing it down. But before long, it was business as usual.
In December of ’01, author and pop culture historian Michael Barson told USA Today, “I was one of those people who believed in mid-September that from this moment on, everything would never again be the same. But it’s three months later now, and I’m reading the movie release schedule and the TV show schedules. Well, if you had just been dropped down from Jupiter, as long as you didn’t read the front page of the newspapers, you wouldn’t know all this stuff had happened.”
Sadly, he was right. The other day I listened to “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” for the first time in ages. The checklist of questions raised on that ballad include, “Did you dust off that Bible at home?” “Did you turn off that violent old movie you’re watchin’ and turn on I Love Lucy reruns?” and “Did you go to a church and hold hands with some strangers?” In other words, the man in the white cowboy hat wanted to know, How did this catastrophe change your behavior?
When you consider the heart-wrenching devastation and loss of 9/11, it would be some consolation to think that it pricked our conscience and sharpened our character as a nation. Enhanced our civility. Deepened our dependence on the God in whom (at least according to our currency) we trust. But if that day’s most enduring effect on our lives turns out to be the inconvenience of airport security, then it would be doubly tragic. We got a wake-up call 10 years ago. Then we hit the snooze button. I pray that America is being stirred once again as we look back.
So where were you when the world stopped turning? And what are your thoughts about 9/11’s impact on our nation and popular culture, both in the short term and today?
If you haven’t already done so, please be sure to read Paul Asay’s article The Way We Watched After 9/11.
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