Nineteen years later, [Aidan] Thayer is a fifth-year undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, where he triple-majors in physics, mathematics and German. Thayer, despite his near-photographic memory, can only recall some scenes from the day of the attacks.
For older Americans, in contrast, 9/11 remains a vivid memory. Ten years later, 97% of Americans 8 or older at the time could remember exactly where they were when they heard the news, according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center.
For many young people, though, 9/11 is a subject learned secondhand.
“It feels like something that we learned in history books, something like World War Two,” said Christina Liu, 22, from New York City. Liu graduated from New York University last year and will start work this month as an associated development operations engineer at Veeva Systems, a cloud computing company in California.
“It seems very distant to me, despite being an event that happened in my lifetime,” added Liu, who found she couldn’t distinguish her memories of 9/11 from her memories of a massive 2003 power outage dubbed the Great Northeast Blackout.
19 Years On, Does a Post-9/11 Generation Remember the Attacks? https://t.co/j7x9auxcXM
— The Voice of America (@VOANews) September 11, 2020