By Jeffrey T. Donner, Esq.

September 11, 2026

Twenty-five years ago today, on September 11, 2001, the world changed in a way that has now become so familiar to say that the phrase itself risks sounding ceremonial. Every anniversary brings back the same photographs, the same television footage, the same stories about where people were when they first heard that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center. Those images remain powerful because the event itself remains almost impossible to absorb, even after a quarter century. But what strikes me most on the twenty-fifth anniversary is not merely the horror of that morning. It is the distance between the world we thought we lived in before September 11 and the world that followed.

I graduated from law school in 1999. On September 11, 2001, I was two years out of law school and working as a young lawyer in Holland & Knight’s Orlando office. I remember that morning vividly. Like millions of other people, I remember the confusion before anyone understood what was happening, the transition from thinking that a terrible accident had occurred to realizing that the country was under attack, and the strange paralysis that followed as people gathered around televisions and tried to process events that did not fit into the normal categories of everyday life. It was one of those rare historical moments in which virtually everyone who lived through it remembers not simply the event, but the room they were in, the people around them, and the feeling that the normal assumptions of the day had suddenly stopped applying.

What is harder to recover now is the mindset we had before that morning. The late 1990s and very early 2000s were not an idyllic period, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. There were wars, terrorism, crime, political scandal, racial conflict, inequality, and all of the usual problems that accompany human society. Yet there was also, especially among young professionals beginning their careers in the United States, a widespread sense that the basic structure of life was relatively stable. The Cold War had ended. The economy was strong. The Internet was still new enough to seem mostly exciting rather than invasive. Technology appeared to promise greater convenience and prosperity. American institutions seemed durable, even when people complained about them. The future seemed uncertain in the ordinary sense, but not fundamentally unrecognizable.

Looking back, there was a certain naivete in that outlook. We had inherited the idea that progress, while uneven, generally moved in one direction. Major problems arose, but responsible people eventually dealt with them. Governments made mistakes, corporations made mistakes, courts made mistakes, and voters made mistakes, but the overall system seemed capable of correcting itself. Elections were bitter but usually finite. News came from a relatively small number of institutions. Telephones were used primarily to call people. A person could leave his house without carrying a device that constantly tracked his location, delivered political outrage, displayed breaking news, invited strangers to argue with him, and placed the accumulated information of the world within reach at all times. We did not know how profoundly technology, politics, economics, and culture were about to change.

September 11 shattered one layer of that confidence almost immediately. The attack itself was horrifying not merely because of the number of people murdered, but because it demonstrated that the physical security Americans had taken for granted was far more fragile than we had assumed. The weeks and months that followed brought an entirely new vocabulary into ordinary life. Americans began speaking routinely about homeland security, terror alerts, no-fly lists, sleeper cells, intelligence failures, airport screening, preemptive war, and weapons of mass destruction. Institutions were reorganized. Surveillance expanded. Air travel became permanently different. The country entered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that lasted far longer than most people initially imagined and produced consequences that were far more complicated than the confident political rhetoric of the early 2000s suggested.

Those wars were only the beginning of a quarter century in which the supposedly impossible became increasingly routine. The financial crisis of 2008 provided another profound shock to the idea that sophisticated institutions were being managed by sophisticated people. Some of the largest banks and financial firms in the world had loaded themselves with mortgage-backed securities, leverage, derivatives, and risks that were poorly understood or deliberately ignored. The consequences were not confined to Wall Street. Homes went into foreclosure, retirement accounts collapsed, businesses failed, unemployment rose, and ordinary people who had played no role in designing the financial system bore much of the damage. The crisis exposed a recurring feature of modern life: institutions can appear stable for years, right up until the moment their underlying assumptions fail.

The 2008 crash also contributed to something that has defined much of the period since September 11: a collapse in public trust. Americans became more skeptical of government, banks, corporations, universities, media organizations, and experts of every kind. Some of that skepticism was justified. Institutions repeatedly gave people reasons to doubt them. Government officials were wrong about major issues. Financial leaders sometimes appeared to face few consequences for catastrophic decisions. Media organizations made errors while simultaneously becoming more partisan and more dependent on attention. Corporate leaders increasingly spoke in the language of public virtue while pursuing ordinary commercial interests. The gap between institutional rhetoric and institutional performance became harder to ignore.

At the same time, the media environment changed beyond recognition. In 2001, most Americans still encountered national events through newspapers, radio, and a relatively limited number of television networks. The Internet existed, but social media had not yet reorganized public discourse. Over the next two decades, that changed completely. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, smartphones, podcasts, streaming platforms, and later TikTok dissolved the old information structure and replaced it with something far more fragmented. Every person became a potential publisher, broadcaster, critic, expert, propagandist, and conspiracy theorist. The democratization of information produced obvious benefits, but it also created an environment in which falsehood could travel as easily as truth and outrage could be monetized more efficiently than restraint.

One of the peculiar consequences of that transformation has been the disappearance of a common factual environment. People can now live in the same city, vote in the same election, and consume entirely different versions of reality. Algorithms feed users what they are most likely to engage with, and anger is highly engaging. Political disagreement has therefore become not only more intense but more totalizing. People increasingly disagree not simply about what should be done, but about what happened, who can be trusted, and whether institutions have any legitimacy at all. That fragmentation did not begin with Donald Trump, but his political rise revealed and accelerated it in ways that would have been difficult to imagine in 2001.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, his emergence as the central political figure of the last decade reflected a country that had already become deeply skeptical of the old political order. A reality television personality defeated experienced politicians, took over one of the major parties, became president, lost reelection, remained dominant within his party, returned to office, and transformed the tone of American politics. Supporters saw him as a rejection of a corrupt establishment. Opponents saw him as a threat to constitutional norms and democratic institutions. The intensity of those competing views became a defining fact of American public life. Politics increasingly became identity, entertainment, grievance, and cultural warfare all at once.

The Trump era also demonstrated how quickly behavior once regarded as disqualifying could become ordinary through repetition. Statements, controversies, scandals, investigations, impeachments, prosecutions, protests, and constitutional disputes arrived so frequently that events which would once have dominated public life for months often disappeared within days. Americans developed a kind of political exhaustion. The pace became too fast to sustain the level of outrage demanded by each new controversy. What once would have seemed extraordinary gradually became background noise.

Then came COVID-19, an event that made even the post-September 11 world seem temporarily unfamiliar. For generations, Americans had understood pandemics primarily as historical subjects. Then, in early 2020, much of ordinary life stopped. Schools closed. Businesses shut their doors. Courthouses emptied. Offices moved into homes. Air travel collapsed. Weddings were postponed. Funerals were restricted. Children attended school through computer screens, and professionals who had spent careers believing that important work had to be conducted in person suddenly learned to operate through Zoom. Hospitals filled, supply chains broke down, and millions of people around the world died.

COVID also exposed and intensified every weakness that had been accumulating in public life. Scientific uncertainty became political ammunition. Public-health decisions became partisan symbols. Masking, vaccines, school closures, business restrictions, and government authority all became cultural dividing lines. People who once would have deferred automatically to experts began questioning whether institutions were being candid. Experts sometimes communicated uncertainty poorly or spoke with more confidence than the available evidence justified. Politicians selectively embraced scientific claims that supported their policies and rejected those that did not. The pandemic therefore became not merely a medical emergency but another stage in the broader collapse of shared trust.

At the same time, technological change continued at a pace that would have sounded absurd in 2001. Smartphones became nearly universal. Social media became embedded in political campaigns, friendships, commerce, entertainment, and everyday life. Traditional newspapers shrank or disappeared. Streaming replaced scheduled television for millions of people. Remote work became normal in professions that once considered it impractical. Artificial intelligence, long treated as either a science-fiction concept or an academic research subject, became a practical tool used by lawyers, doctors, programmers, businesses, students, and governments. Tasks that once required hours of manual work can now be performed in minutes, while entirely new questions have emerged about employment, authenticity, privacy, intellectual property, and the meaning of expertise.

The irony is that many of these technologies were supposed to simplify life. Some plainly have. It is easier to communicate, find information, navigate unfamiliar places, buy products, run a business, and perform professional work than it was twenty-five years ago. Yet the cumulative effect has not necessarily been a calmer society. We are more connected and more distracted, more informed and more overwhelmed, more efficient and often more anxious. We have immediate access to events occurring anywhere in the world, which means we are exposed continuously to crises that earlier generations might have learned about once a day in a newspaper. The human nervous system was probably not designed for a device that can deliver war footage, financial news, political outrage, family photographs, legal work, advertisements, and arguments with strangers within the same five-minute period.

That is one reason the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11 feels different from the earlier anniversaries. Five years after the attacks, September 11 still felt like a recent national trauma. Ten years afterward, the wars it produced were still central to American life. Fifteen years afterward, the political world was already changing dramatically, but the full scale of what was coming was not yet obvious. Twenty-five years later, September 11 now appears less like one terrible event standing alone and more like the opening boundary of an entire historical era.

People born after September 11 are now adults. Many have careers. Some are lawyers, soldiers, parents, teachers, police officers, engineers, and business owners. They have no memory of walking an elderly relative to an airport gate without a boarding pass, no memory of a world before smartphones, and no memory of a political culture in which most citizens received their national news from the same handful of institutions. What those of us who are older still think of as the post-September 11 world is simply the world to them.

For those of us who remember the years before 2001, the contrast is much sharper. I was a young lawyer then, thinking primarily about learning my profession, handling assignments correctly, building a career, and figuring out adult life. I was not walking around Holland & Knight’s Orlando office thinking that I was living at the end of one historical period and the beginning of another. Almost nobody experiences history that way in real time. History announces itself only occasionally. More often, it accumulates through events that seem disconnected until enough time has passed to reveal a pattern.

With twenty-five years of distance, the pattern is difficult to miss. In a single quarter century, Americans have lived through the September 11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial collapse, the foreclosure crisis, prolonged political polarization, the transformation of the media environment, the rise of social media, the Trump era, a global pandemic, extraordinary civil unrest, repeated institutional crises, rapid technological change, and the arrival of artificial intelligence as an ordinary part of professional and personal life. Any one of those developments could have defined an era. Instead, they arrived one after another.

There is a tendency on major anniversaries to impose a comforting moral structure on events. We want history to teach a clear lesson. We want tragedy to produce unity, adversity to produce wisdom, and suffering to make institutions stronger. The reality is less tidy. America endured September 11, but the unity that followed did not last. The country learned some lessons and ignored others. Government institutions adapted in some areas and failed in others. The wars that followed the attacks produced both legitimate security gains and costly mistakes. The financial system survived 2008, but public trust suffered lasting damage. The country developed vaccines for COVID with remarkable speed, yet the pandemic deepened political and cultural divisions. Technology has empowered individuals while also destabilizing the institutions through which society once established a common understanding of events.

That does not mean the last twenty-five years should be viewed only through the lens of decline. The period has also produced remarkable medical advances, extraordinary technological innovation, improved access to information, new forms of entrepreneurship, and opportunities that would have been impossible to imagine in 2001. The United States remains a wealthy, dynamic country with powerful institutions and enormous capacity for adaptation. But optimism after twenty-five years of turbulence has to be more mature than the optimism many of us carried into adulthood in the 1990s. It cannot depend on the assumption that institutions automatically work, that experts are automatically correct, that markets automatically discipline themselves, or that technological progress automatically produces social progress.

Perhaps that is the largest difference between the young lawyer I was in September 2001 and the person looking back twenty-five years later. In 2001, I assumed the world was basically stable and that disruption was the exception. After twenty-five years, it is much easier to see that disruption may be the constant and stability the temporary achievement. Institutions have to be maintained. Democratic norms have to be defended. Expertise has to earn credibility. Markets have to be regulated intelligently. Technology has to be used without pretending that every innovation is automatically beneficial. None of those things happens by itself.

September 11 remains unique because of the lives taken that morning and because of the deliberate cruelty of the attack. Nothing about the events that followed should blur that fact. Nearly three thousand people went to work, boarded airplanes, reported for duty, or simply began an ordinary Tuesday morning and never came home. Families were permanently altered. First responders entered buildings from which thousands of people were desperately trying to escape. The human cost is the central fact of the anniversary and always should be.

But twenty-five years later, September 11 also marks a dividing line in memory. There was the world before that morning, when I was two years out of law school and still assumed that the future would probably resemble the recent past. Then there was everything that followed: war, financial collapse, political upheaval, pandemic, technological disruption, and an increasingly strange public culture in which each supposedly unprecedented event seems to be replaced by another before anyone has fully processed the last one.

Maybe every generation eventually reaches an age at which the world of its youth begins to look impossibly distant. People who lived through 1929, 1941, 1968, or other periods of upheaval probably experienced the same sensation. The difference is that when we are young, we tend to imagine history as something that happened to other people. It exists in books, documentaries, old photographs, and court opinions. Only later do we realize that history was happening around us the entire time.

On September 11, 2001, I was a young lawyer watching television in an office in Orlando while something unimaginable unfolded hundreds of miles away. I did not know what the next twenty-five years would bring, and I doubt anyone else did either. If someone had described them to us in detail—the wars, the financial crash, the political upheaval, the pandemic, the smartphones, the social media culture, the artificial intelligence, and the general strangeness of American life in 2026—we probably would have considered the description implausible.

Yet here we are.

Twenty-five years is enough time to stop pretending that the world simply “returned to normal” after September 11. It did not. The country continued forward, but it entered a period that has been more volatile, more connected, more technologically powerful, more distrustful, and in many respects more difficult to understand than the one that came before it.

For those of us who remember September 11, the morning itself still feels surprisingly close. The world that existed before it does not.