How a little girl put a human face to the 9/11 tragedy

Hey there, time traveller!

In the unsettled days after it happened, before we referred to it as 9/11, the news was on all the time.

The TV in my family’s living room was permanently glued to CNN. On a loop, the footage of the north tower of the World Trade Center billowing smoke over Manhattan, after American Airlines Flight 11 plowed through it on a cloudless September morning. The footage of United Airlines Flight 175 making explosive contact with the south tower, caught live by news cameras already trained in on the first tower.

I didn’t see it when it actually happened. I was getting ready for school, in my first few weeks of Grade 11. There were no smartphones, so there were no push notifications, no news alerts or texts buzzing in my pocket. The news was broken to me not by a journalist on TV, but by a breathless 16-year-old classmate, late for first period.
Ruth McCourt and her daughter Juliana Valentine McCourt were headed to Disneyland on United Airlines Flight 175 on Sept. 11, 2001. (Facebook photo)
Eventually, CNN added a news crawl, listing the names and ages of the passengers aboard the hijacked planes. One of them stuck out to me: Juliana Valentine, 4. A little girl with a storybook name. I saw her name over and over again from the glow of that ever-present TV. I thought about how terrified she must have been. How terrified her mother must have been.

In the 20 years since it happened, I’ve thought a lot about Juliana Valentine, 4 — and, for a long time, that’s all I knew about her. A name on a manifest. In the years that immediately followed 9/11, the internet was still dial-up; the details of Juliana’s short life were not a Google search away, not like they are now.

Now, via a few simple clicks, I know that Juliana Valentine McCourt was from Connecticut. She was born on May 4. She had blue eyes and blond pigtails. She was a passenger on Flight 175, and she was travelling with her mom, Ruth. Juliana had a godmother, Paige, who was on Flight 11. They were going to Disneyland.

Last year, on what should have been her 23rd birthday, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City placed a white rose by her name. I learned that from Facebook.

In September 2019, Garrett M. Graff wrote a fascinating article for Wired called “Pagers, Pay Phones and Dialup: How We Communicated on 9/11” that also imagined what the experience of Sept. 11 would have been like if it had happened today: “We would Google ‘Taliban’ and end up reading Wikipedia to explain our new enemies to us, as Google Earth sleuths pointed out al-Qaida’s training camps outside Kandahar.”

Of course, as he points out, there’d also be Facebook Lives and Instagram stories. Perhaps the people on the planes would have grabbed furtive smartphone footage of what was happening to them. There would be countless images of death and destruction captured by people on the ground, and they would be posted in real time. There would be GoFundMe pages and hot takes and conspiracy theories and news explainers. Outrage in the form of 140-word tweets, grief in the form of prayer-hands emojis.

Graff argued that what made Sept. 11 so life-altering is that “experiencing tragedy collectively at such a nationalized and global scale was so new and unprecedented that day.” And now? “It seems likely that today we would turn not to one another for comfort, to grieve as a nation, but instead each burrow even deeper into our now ever-present phones, scrolling, clicking, liking, and emoji-ing as the tragedy unfolded.”

For, say, a 24-year-old, the age Juliana Valentine is supposed to be, it would be hard to remember a time before Google Images and Facebook. It would be hard to remember the collective experience of 9/11 at all if you were four years old when it happened — and it was something that happened on TV. In 2001, if you wanted to disengage from the news cycle, you changed the channel or turned the radio dial. It was still possible, then, to look away.

That’s not true for those to whom it happened, of course. The people left behind, the families ripped apart by the attacks themselves and the ensuing, decades-spanning wars — they still live with it. Juliana’s story is one of thousands from that day. The internet, and its ever-faster currents of information — coupled with the pull to document instead of experience — can indeed have a flattening, fragmenting and desensitizing effect as a tragedy is unfolding. But it can also connect us with the individual human stories from that day, stories that deserve to be shared and remembered.

The first responder. The family still hoping for a positive ID of a loved one’s remains. Or the little girl who never made it to Disneyland.