What Does Crisis Reveal About Us?

We are so good at falling back on what we already believe.

Looking toward the White House along 16th Street in the nation’s capital.

I learned my first real lesson about human nature around the time America began to come apart.

It was the morning of September 11, 2001, in Washington, DC. Summers in the District are typically oppressive, but that day felt like a shift—the first sign that the heavy East Coast humidity was beginning to break. The air was lighter, the sky without haze, the temperature just right. For some reason, I had coffee on the rooftop of my building that morning—something I’d never done before. As anyone will tell you, September 11th began as a perfect day.

Washington is shaped like a diamond, and the 16th Street bus I took each morning ran straight down its spine—from the Maryland suburbs to my apartment in Mount Pleasant, then on to Farragut Square near the White House, where I got off to walk to my job in government relations in Foggy Bottom. I’d been in the city most of the year by then, but I still went out of my way to walk past the White House. If you’re wired as a political nerd, it never gets old.

I arrived at the William M. Mercer Government Resource Group DC office, and conference room was already in use—colleagues from New York were holding an early meeting as I passed by.

It was 8:45.

I poured a second coffee, sat down, logged in, and tried to pull up The Washington Post, which is how most people in DC start their day. The page wouldn’t load. I tried The Wall Street Journal. Same thing. I assumed the internet was down. Then I opened The Times of London, which loaded immediately. There was a single headline: “Airplane Hits World Trade Center,” or something close to that. The event had just occurred. No article—just a line.

I spent the next few minutes toggling between sites, trying to make sense of it, when a colleague stopped by and said the news was on in the conference room. I joined a group already gathered—some of them had offices in the North Tower. Everyone was watching in silence as smoke poured out from one of the world’s most recognizable buildings. The general assumption was that it was an accident—how else could a commercial airliner hit an office tower? In 2001, America still carried a certain optimism. The idea that it was intentional seemed remote—until it wasn’t.

Here’s where my memory begins to blur. At some point, the second plane hit the South Tower. Even though I was watching, I don’t remember the moment of impact. What I do remember is the New York colleagues crying, trying to make phone calls that wouldn’t go through. No one knew what to say. We stood there, watching the unthinkable unfold live on television.

Soon after, the cameras cut to images of the Pentagon. One of the Mercer principals walked in and said it had been bombed. No one suspected a plane. Someone asked if it had been a missile.

We were stunned. Afraid, but also trying to understand. A few of us ran to the stairwell and climbed up to the roof. Across the river in Virginia, we could see smoke rising against the clear blue sky.

We all know how the rest of the day unfolded. By the time every plane in the country had been grounded and it was assumed that DC was no longer an immediate target, I think around 11 a.m., we were told to go home.

Phone lines were jammed, so I couldn’t reach my girlfriend. But we connected via email and met somewhere along M Street.

The two-mile walk home was eerily quiet. DC drivers are famously impatient, but that day, no one honked—even as traffic jammed every intersection. People were raiding convenience stores for bottled water and lining up at gas stations. It was chaotic, but no one said much.

My girlfriend’s sister lived in New York. She was far from Lower Manhattan, but we worried anyway..

That night, someone was held up at gunpoint just outside our bedroom window—back then, part of daily life in DC. We lay in bed with the lights on, staring at the ceiling. Do we leave town? And if so, where would we go?

Most people worked from home in the days that followed. Flights remained grounded for nearly a week.

The year 2001 wasn’t that long ago, but it was a different time. There was no way to post your reactions in real time. Social media didn’t exist, and blogs were still emerging. (WordPress wouldn’t launch for another couple of years.) Back then, organic political commentary traveled by email forwards and chain messages. My inbox filled with reactions to what we’d just witnessed. My West Coast college friends sent everything from conspiracy theories—claiming the attacks were an inside job—and my high school friends predicted declarations of inevitable retribution. Others were more reflective, recognizing the attacks as a consequence of the interconnected world we lived in, and questioning whether American foreign policy had laid the groundwork. Remember, this happened amid a worldwide anti-globalization movement—one that most people forgot about by 8:46 am on the 11th of September.

What struck me then—and even more so in hindsight—was how quickly people retreated into their existing worldviews. There was a brief, almost mythic moment of national unity, but it didn’t last. Hawks saw the attacks as justification for overwhelming force. Doves questioned what America might have done to provoke such violence. Some people needed certainty and others needed context. But very few seemed capable of seeing past the lens they already wore.

It was my first clear view of how, in a moment of shared trauma, human beings tend not to recalibrate—but to double down.

Our default mode to crisis doesn’t broaden perspective. It narrows it.

It doesn’t erase ideology. It sharpens it.

We are living through period of profound transition.

Technological shifts, political polarization, and economic uncertainty are all converging—and navigating all of this is going to require a new toolkit. Whether we’re talking about American political life in 2025 or economic development in Portland, Oregon, the path forward will require something we’re not particularly good at: seeing past the dogma we came in with.

This piece is the beginning of an occasional series—one aimed at questioning the stories we tell ourselves about our world, and what exploring what it might take to build the one we want to live in. Not through slogans or pre-baked ideologies, but through imagination, humility, and the discipline to entertain paths we may not have chosen on our own. If equilibrium is possible, it will require all of us to let go of prejudice and be willing to see the full picture, even when that challenges our assumptions.