Milton’s Relationship With 9/11

By Ellie O’Connor ’29

This year, on September 11th, Milton Academy honored the day with an Instagram post. The post included some thoughts on the day and reflections on the on-campus twin trees and 9/11 commemorative plaque. I originally viewed these commemorations as insufficient for the gravitas the day holds. When Jiner Huang ’28, the opinion editor for The Milton Paper, encouraged me to write a piece on 9/11 and Milton’s response this year, I thought I knew my stance on the topic. The article would center around how Milton remained nearly silent on 9/11 this year and how that silence mirrored self-censoring in our current political and pop culture media. I believed our school’s stillness on September 11th was because of how controversial 9/11 is, and at such an international school, with such an international community, they had to have stayed silent out of not wanting to offend anyone — surely.

Dead set on my mission, I ventured out into the Milton community to interview various people. Ms. Lund, who was in her sophomore year of high school when the attacks took place, noted that the “moments around it [9/11] are crystallized” in her memory. She walked me through that day in meticulous detail — all about her classes and schedule. Lund pointed out that she was part of a specifically “formative” age group when 9/11 took place and that she and her peers were “closely impacted” by the event. 9/11 cast a “gray realism” over her view of the U.S. government and “matured [her] perspective”. When asked if 9/11 was an international turning point in history, she responded with the statement that “the U.S. turned [9/11] into a globalized conflict”. Her point of view on 9/11 and its significance in culture represents the more generalized American view on the attacks. Ms. Lund belongs to a generation that remembers September 11th, 2001, in vivid detail, as opposed to me and my generation. A generation that has only ever heard secondhand accounts and stories of the day. This is when I first found my original opinion to start shifting.

I decided to interview some of the international students at our school to get a different take on the topic. Mira Lu ’27 and Nora Lu ’29 stated that they learned about 9/11 only from their parents and that the topic was not covered in their Hong Kong schooling. While this did not come as a complete shock to me, their words offered a completely different perspective on 9/11 — one that I had never encountered in my homogeneous community before. They believed that the event was important, but neither of the two had an emotional attachment to the day, much like many young Americans now.

Anaya Purusharthy ’29, an international student from Saudi Arabia, revealed that she learned about 9/11 in 5th or 6th grade from her teacher. However, it took a teacher “from the U.S.” to do so, highlighting Americans’ perceived importance of 9/11 on an international scale. When asked if 9/11 had impacted their personal lives, Purusharthy responded with “no,” highly contrasting with Ms. Lund’s answer. Purusharthy did state, however, that 9/11 shaped “how [Americans] view most Middle Eastern people,” especially in pop culture and movies. After interviewing these individuals, my opinion on Milton’s response to 9/11 had flipped into something completely different.

The attacks on the Twin Towers are much more than the common Western narrative told around them. My personal point of view on 9/11 has changed, and I have the Milton community to thank for that switch. So while I no longer think that Milton’s lack of a response to 9/11 symbolizes a self-censoring culture, I do still firmly believe that our community can do more. It is not up to our school administrators to lead the school in a day of self reflection on the events of 9/11. The truth is that our student body doesn’t have the same relationship with September 11th as the faculty do. Ms. Lund’s experience and views on 9/11 cannot be our own because we weren’t there. It is up to us, the student body, to decide how to remember this day in history. Milton’s silence on 9/11 was not self-censorship, but instead space given to the student body to create our own collective narrative. Milton’s silence spoke volumes.