I was three, just a few months older than John-John, when his father President John F. Kennedy was shot. I don’t remember the incident at all, nor am I aware of a difference in temperament before and after that fateful day in November of ’63. But I’m told it was distinct, black and white, an absolute clarity in “before and after” references. I’m told Kennedy came with hope, with promise, with lofty goals like landing a man on the moon and cleaning the earth, the Peace Corps, the hope of peace in general. He was young and so was most of the population as the first wave of baby-boomers came of age. Things were good.

Camelot.

I saw footage of the event only in great retrospect years later. People talked about conspiracy theories, they talked about Vietnam and Civil Rights; and they talked about the subtle differences of expectation and hope before and after November 22^nd, 1963. But I only ever understood a post-Dallas world; there will always be something lacking in the narrative for those of us who didn’t experience life back then, in the times before Dallas. There will always be some subtle element we will never be able to grasp.

***

I used to ask my writing students this week every year, what do you remember? How were your parents that day?  Their work covered the spectrum from indifference to passionate recollections of military members who had returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. And, predictably, as the years went by the details became less clear, less “involved,” and more repetitive to what they heard from others, from history class even.

I don’t ask those questions anymore. None of my current college students were yet born September 11^th, 2001.

They couldn’t know that before 911 our thought process was different, more hopeful, absent of impending doom. We still had that absolute conviction that whatever happened to us as individuals and as a nation was still pretty much in our hands. They have no idea that before that day we looked forward to what was next, not fearful of what might happen. Our daily vocabulary was absent of phrases involving extremism, terrorism, anthrax, and Fallujah. These concepts were real and among us, but they affected others, were problems for others, were handled by others. Our attitudes of issues concerning Afghanistan and Iraq and terrorism back then are similar to my students at this campus in Virginia worrying about what is happening to students at some college eight thousand miles away. We were peripherally aware of a situation, that’s all.

***

Higher education has once again become more of a world of industrial education, where students expect that the sole purpose of their classes should be to prepare them for employment, where enrollment is plummeting not just because of cost but because of the greater population of teenagers not seeing a point to it, so there is a desperate need for the study of philosophy and art. Am I being too optimistic? Am I tilting at windmills? I suppose.

But In a world which has adjusted to constant violence and invasion, where disease is rampant and the climate is killing us, I can’t think of a better time for educators to emphasize the potential of humanity. But technology is our new curriculum, and students today are convinced it is the sole foundation of whatever they do. But “it has become appallingly obvious,” Einstein said, “that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

“Intelligence plus character is the goal of a true education,” Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted. Yes, let’s go there. Let’s get back to that pre-911 thought process. It seems we are in dire need of starting over. Now. The earth is dying and the human race is watching it all happen on Instagram and TikTok. In this culture, we cannot teach anyone what “hope” was like in the before times; all we can do is hope. Educators first must be examples. In these times, those of us older than forty are by virtue of memory social historians who can remember a world of possibility and promise. We were there.

According to Plato: “The direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future in life.” Shouldn’t we start with hope? With possibility. We didn’t used to have to teach those ideals, but my students weren’t born when those once innate concepts were foundations instead of today’s cyber security and terrorist activities.

I cannot teach these people what life was like before terrorism terrified our cities. I can perhaps describe what it was like to sit at a table for lunch at Windows on the World completely absent of fear and enjoy the view. I can talk about crossing borders without interrogation, walking family members all the way to the plane for their departure, carrying pretty much anything I wanted on board a flight. I can talk about what wasn’t talked about, places we never heard of.  I can ask them why it isn’t like that anymore and what do we need to do to find our way there again.

Now I ask them to write what they think is humanity’s greatest strength, most encouraging potential. The papers are sparse. Their minds draw a blank; and it isn’t their fault. If the terrorists succeeded in one aspect in affecting American culture, it is this: We used to think about what can go right; now we think about what might go wrong.

That’s as tragic as the difference between pre and post can get.