Since you weren’t even born yet, I’m going to answer in good faith: 9/11 was America’s collective loss of innocence. In the decades prior, we’d won the Cold War by outspending the Soviets. We were the sole remaining superpower, and we were in a period of peace and economic prosperity. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we suffered a suicide attack with a higher death toll than Pearl Harbor. It struck a city on the US mainland, the first attack of that scale to hit CONUS since the Civil War. In a violent flash, and on live television, our collective illusions of safety, security, and peace disappeared. For most Americans, it was the first time we ever had to contend with that scale of horror, and what it implied about the fragility of our way of life. It was simultaneously sobering and terrifying. The American response was to launch two wars, and to restructure domestic life around the Government’s presumed duty to spy on everyone, so nothing like it could ever happen again. I am not being hyperbolic when I say the America we grew up in—imagined or not—vanished on 9/11. What you’re calling a “worshipful attitude” is a mix of reverence for the dead, and mourning for the loss of what existed before.

The pagan girl. The christian girl.