I Had Time to Be Angry - The Steady State

My anger after September 11 could have taken me somewhere very different. Instead, people gave me time, purpose, and a way to participate.

I was eighteen on September 11, 2001, and still trying to figure out what came next. My closest friends had left for college that summer, while I stayed behind in Bakersfield, California, taking community college classes. I had a close-knit family, but with my friends gone and little sense of direction, I was feeling pretty alone.

I was sleeping in that Tuesday when the phone rang. It was my mother’s friend trying to reach my own, telling me to turn on the television because New York was being “bombed by airplanes.” I couldn’t make sense of it; imagining World War II bombers swooping down on Manhattan, I turned on the TV just in time to see the North Tower collapse, its antenna disappearing into an abyss of smoke and dust. New York wasn’t being bombed by planes. It was being bombed with planes. In a matter of seconds, the world I knew had violently spun out of control.

As I write this, I think about the impact of that day on many of my colleagues at The Steady State who were already establishing their careers in American foreign policy, national security, law enforcement, and the military, and what they felt as they waited for news about their own family members, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who worked in the Pentagon, in downtown Manhattan, or who they knew to be traveling that day. I was just an eighteen-year-old kid, standing in my boxers in front of my bedroom TV, beginning to experience a surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline that I’d never quite felt before. I don’t know about you, but to this day I feel like some of that acceleration we all experienced that morning has never quite stopped.

In the days that followed, the shock became an anger unlike anything I had felt before. It felt personal, even though I knew no one directly affected. Like many Americans, I wanted revenge – although I couldn’t have explained what that would look like or where it should be aimed. I struggled to explain even to myself what I was feeling. All I knew was that I had to do something, but I had no idea what.

So I went looking for the people who I assumed might know, starting with the military recruiting offices in downtown Bakersfield, where one recruiter advised me to finish the school year before signing anything. The next door opened almost by accident: driving past Congressman Bill Thomas’s district office, I turned in – no appointment or particular person in mind, just an awkward question about how to get involved in politics. A young aide brought me into a conference room and walked me through how to get started, where to go, and to whom to talk. He seemed taken with my idealism and encouraged it, rather than treating it as ignorance to be outgrown.

I volunteered for Thomas’ campaign – phone-banking, knocking on doors, learning how to get a candidate around a district – on a team small enough that even my inexperienced opinions were heard in good faith. Participating in democracy felt like an answer to the vicious extremism I’d witnessed deployed against our country: a way to build something with hope rather than destroying something with vengeance. The campaign also changed me in ways I didn’t notice immediately. My black-and-white view of the world began to dissolve at strangers’ front doors, and without quite realizing it, I was becoming more curious, less angry.

That path eventually led to Peace Corps service in Mongolia and a career spanning international development, law enforcement, and national security. At every stop, the world – and my understanding of the people who live in it – got bigger. It still does.

Looking back, I wonder what would have happened had I been eighteen today. I can’t know how social media would have impacted me, but I do know that a loving family and an impulse toward service don’t ensure immunity. Young people can be loved and still keep their loneliness, confusion, or anger to themselves.

Research describes online radicalization as a complicated interaction between personal circumstances, relationships, and online communities, rather than a predictable journey from anger to extremism. What worries me is what those online communities offer someone who’s struggling: simple explanations to complex problems, convenient enemies, and a sense of belonging that can make grievance feel like purpose, and cruelty feel like solidarity.

Extremist spaces existed online in 2001, but the internet was smaller and far more siloed: no reels, no TikToks, no smartphones with 24/7 access to a feed. I had to carry my anger around for weeks, which gave it time to mellow into something more nuanced.

Today a smartphone can be the first “office” a struggling young person enters, no business hours or receptionist required. A quick search or an algorithmically recommended video can offer an answer before anyone around him or her knows there was a question. Of course, that search can also connect people to help and constructive communities. But when belonging depends on a shared enemy and approval comes from escalating contempt, the desire to participate warps into something very different.

I was lucky: I had time to think, and I found a congressional office and someone willing to listen. But, well, it was luck.

Public service can’t guarantee that someone will reject extremism, but it can offer identity, purpose, fellowship, and agency without requiring an enemy. At their best, America’s institutions provide mentors who take young people’s questions seriously, civic education tied to actual participation, and accessible opportunities for national and community service. Much of my work since has been an attempt to make the door I walked through available to others.

Twenty-five years later, September 11 still marks the beginning of the course my life would take. What began as anger became something else because of the people I met and the doors they showed me.

Somewhere, today, an eighteen-year-old has just watched something terrible on a screen and is thinking: I have to do something, and I don’t know what. They are going to go looking for people who seem to know the answers, and they’re going to find someone in about four seconds. We cannot leave it to luck whether that first person offers them someone to hate – or something built on hope.

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