One of the best firsthand accounts of the Sept. 11 attacks is a short essay titled “Diary of Disaster” by Nicholas Spangler, a 25-year-old journalism-school student at the time and today a reporter for Newsday on Long Island. Spangler was downtown that morning, close enough to the World Trade Center to arrive between the first and second planes. He heard jumpers’ bodies hit the pavement and easy-listening music from the towers’ speakers.

Under a tree, a severed leg wrapped in burlap lay. An hour after the second tower collapsed, onlookers asked him to take a souvenir photo with a disposable camera. Days later, he wrote that ‘our present way of life ended’ and the American ethos had fractured.

Three months later, he revised his view: ‘Our way of life did not end so much as it was interrupted,’ and if an American ethos exists, it has not been significantly altered. Most continue to be shaped by banal events. For years, agreeing on little else, many said 9/11 changed everything.

Questioning that was seen as an affront to victims and war casualties. A quarter-century later, critical distance is possible. Much of our reality stems from 9/11: surveillance tech, open-ended military operations, and armored daily life.

Yet, its influence is not singular—it is a middle chapter in American fracture, not the pyrotechnic beginning. The pre-9/11 era was nervier than remembered, with both left and right restless amid the ‘end of history.’ Retrospective views are shaped by stunned TV anchors narrating attacks in real time.