Keen On

According to the historian Matthew Warshauer, there was no giant conspiracy on 9/11. The real story about September 11, 2001, he argues in his provocative new book Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation, is its impact on Gen Z who he believes should be renamed the 9/11 Generation. 9/11 and its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, have created a lost generation of young Americans without faith in the country’s institutions or elected officials. They’ve been “cast out of the Disneyland” of a unipolar world, he warns, and their cynicism and distrust is only compounding the seemingly never-ending political, economic and cultural crises of the United States over the last quarter century. Rather than the internet and social media, he believes, 9/11 is the root cause of America’s current age of anxiety. Matt Warshauer is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, his under-graduate alma mater, where he learned that passionate, devoted professors can change lives. Originally bore