9/11 resonates with some who weren’t born in 2001 but learned at school and home

OXFORD, Ohio – How real is 9/11 for you?

As you answer that, consider this:

Nearly 1 in 3 living Americans wasn’t yet born on Sept. 11, 2001.

And if the most deadly terror attack ever committed on U.S. soil has started to morph from live news to not-yet-ancient history for people who remember it firsthand, imagine what it means – or doesn’t mean – to people too young to remember it at all.

It’s why we spent this leg of our journey in Oxford to meet with students at Miami University of Ohio.

There’s a memorial on campus to Kelly Booms, a Miami of Ohio graduate who was 24 when she died on Flight 11, which crashed into the northernmost Twin Tower. There are roughly 10 other memorials also dedicated to Booms, in several states, describing her as well-loved and funny and smart.

The note about Booms on the bench near the Miami of Ohio’s Outdoor Pursuit Center (aka Fitness Center) echoes that, but it’s on an aging wooden bench, and the type is so small you need to lean close to read it.

None of the half-dozen students we chatted with Tuesday – all of whom were slightly younger than Booms was when she died – knew it existed.

But they do know a lot about 9/11.

They were taught about it in school, starting in early grades. And lessons continued into high school and, depending on their major, college. It’s an event that’s taught or referenced in classes that touch on history and politics and even economics.

And academic interest in 9/11 – which waned somewhat in the early 2010s – has grown in recent years, as students struggle to make sense of the violence in the Middle East and even the set-in-stone divisions in American politics. One of the best-known Sept. 11 courses, “9/11 and Its Aftermath,” offered at Duke University, regularly turns away dozens of students to keep the class down to 40 people.

But based on our tiny survey, 20-somethings didn’t just learn about 9/11 in school. They heard about it from their parents, much like their parents heard about Pearl Harbor from their parents.

Facts, you can get from a book. But feelings? Not so much.

“I feel more connected to it because my parents lived through it,” said Katie VandeWyngearde, a 20-year-old kinesiology major.

For her classmate, Anna Rasmusson, a 20-year-old nursing student, 9/11 is – for a non-memory – vivid.

“It definitely has a real feeling for me, even though I wasn’t born.”