9/11: 24 years later, the day everyone remembers where they were

9/11: 24 years since the day no one forgets

Twenty-four years later, the question still works as a generational password. Where were you when the Twin Towers fell? Almost everyone has an exact answer: waiting in line for course registration, a nap interrupted by a landline call, eating tapas at a bar, or watching a tube TV in the office. 9/11 became the event everyone remembers, even those who were seven at the time and thought it was a movie.

The conversation peine recently in an economics forum goes beyond nostalgia. It starts with everyday scenes—the first plane hit while someone was breaking up over the phone—and shifts to where the official narrative begins to sustancia ilegal: the World Trade Center Building 7, the tower that collapsed without being hit by a plane, which, according to some, almost no one remembers.

WTC7, the tower almost no one remembers

Most people don't even know WTC7 existed. That is precisely the thesis gaining weight over the years: that the Twin Towers were the visible decoy, and the third building—which fell hours later, without an aircraft impact—is the real core of that day's mystery. The proposed test is simple: ask people on the street and see how many remember a third skyscraper collapsing.

To this are added clues circulating since then: sounds of machinery and heavy objects on supposedly empty floors weeks before, a widespread blackout shortly before the attacks, the fact that Pentagon air defenses did not function that day, or that air interception protocols had been modified shortly before, which would explain the slowness in pursuing hijacked planes. It is also mentioned that the towers had been insured for a high sum months earlier.

None of this constitutes a judicial conclusion. These are the pieces that part of the analysis fits together to argue there was more than a jihadist attack. The other side responds with a simple argument: if it was a false flag to invade Iraq, it went terribly wrong, because the alleged weapons of mass destruction never appeared. And engineers defending the official version, it is said, dismiss critics as conspiracy theorists wearing tinfoil hats.

From the invasion of Afghanistan to the end of history

The thread also reconstructs the causal chain that led there. The USSR invades Afghanistan. A well-born Saudi, Osama bin Laden, goes to fight and builds a database of jihadists. Years later, the United States deploys troops in Saudi Arabia, which infuriates him. Bin Laden moves to Sudan, amasses a fortune thanks to real estate corruption, and from there moves to Afghanistan, where with money, men, and that database he plans the mega-attack. The rest is history.

In parallel appears the intellectual reference hovering over these discussions: Francis Fukuyama and his thesis of the end of history, now widely surpassed. Against him, Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the West are claimed, which, it is argued, was not mistaken. The irony is that that day seemed like the world was ending—and for the victims and their families it was exactly so—while for the rest, the West has been crumbling little by little, not Mad Max-style, but rather with Africanization and the feeling that scams are increasing.

The day global surveillance debuted

There is an uncomfortable consensus: 9/11 inaugurated an era. Governments began surveilling their own populations, attacks became news routine, and the known world ceased to exist. The words of Jesús Hermida on Antena 3 that day—"from today on, the world we knew will never be the same"—were repeated like a prophecy that, looking back, came true for the worse.

The television detail is also recalled: several channels broadcasting live what was initially presented as a plane accident. Interrupting programming to cover an accident was, to say the least, striking. And a recurring curiosity: Michael Jackson had an invitation to the WTC that day and ultimately did not attend; the previous night he had performed at Madison Square Garden and months later released Invincible.

Why 9/11 is remembered and other attacks are not

The question hovering over the anniversary is why this event was etched into collective memory with name and surname, while other attacks, even in the same city, are much less remembered. The most repeated answer is not conspiratorial: it was the first major event broadcast live on television in a world with five channels and no social media. The TV set was sacred. There was no YouTube or Twitter to fragment attention.

Hence 9/11 functions as a generational marker. Those who experienced it as children confuse it with a movie. Those who experienced it working remember the tube TV and someone saying it was far away and wouldn't affect them. Something inside them said otherwise. And so it was.