In 2014, comedian Chris Rock caused outrage when he ridiculed America’s consumer culture with the prediction that, within five years, “9/11 sales” would become a retail fixture. “Prices are falling,” Rock suggested advertisers might boast. Those who missed the point of the punchline protested that it was distasteful to use the terrorist murder of nearly 3,000 people as fodder for humour. When Rock made his remarks during a monologue for Saturday Night Live, it was at a time just before nihilism swept society, and before most Americans stopped caring about anything, much less jokes on late-night television.

In this new climate, Donald Trump can spread cartoonish stories of personal heroism around his response to the attack. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani can sign a bill commemorating 9/11 then gift the pen to his aide, Ramzi Kassem, an attorney who represented an al-Qaeda member whose brother-in-law was one of the 2001 hijackers. Predictable, partisan corners of the internet reacted with anger to Trump and Mamdani. In the broad view, however, no one really cares.

Especially indifferent to the history-making atrocity that occurred 25 years ago is Generation Z. For years, stories have made the rounds online about 9/11-themed parties in which teens and 20-somethings gather around World Trade Center cakes and watch television footage from the day itself. Among the younger generation who weren’t born, or else were still toddlers when the attack occurred, 9/11 has also become a social media meme — a useful gag to mock everything ranging from Millennial aesthetics to celebrities who have fallen out of favour in pop culture.

The transformation of the attacks into a joke is a particularly crude and ghoulish manifestation of the writer David Foster Wallace’s warnings of how a society that treats everything as entertainment will descend into division, dysfunction, and a shared sense of meaninglessness.

As a professor at a small, commuter college in Indiana, I’ve noticed that most of my students are unaware of 9/11. Sure, they know that it happened, but they couldn’t answer even elementary questions about its culprits, victims, or influence on American foreign and domestic policy, which includes two wars, countless bombings in multiple countries, and the enlargement of the national-security state to gigantic proportions. Research confirms that members of Generation Z, because they “cannot remember” the event, are largely oblivious to it. Only 16% percent, according to one poll, claimed that the attack had any effect on their lives.

The Gen-Z combination of historical ignorance and bizarre frivolity is a symptom of a culture that trivialises everything, and an education system that fails to teach anything which doesn’t directly apply to scoring well on standardised tests and applying for jobs. Over the past few decades, high schools and colleges have steadily cut requirements in history, English, civics, the fine arts, and enough other disciplines to make one ponder: what are the students actually learning?

Coincidentally enough, the transformation of education into test preparation began with No Child Left Behind, a massive educational reform bill that President George W. Bush signed into law less than four months after the 9/11 attack. The shift at the university level towards the corporate model of job training started in the same period.

Political pundits enjoy talking about Generation Z as if its members are all woke scolds, but most students, including mine, are really anything but. Ideological judgement requires passion. As their detachment from one of the darkest and most consequential days in recent memory indicates, they are mostly apathetic and dull-eyed when they look towards history. It was only 25 years ago, but to many young people in America, the 9/11 attacks might as well have happened centuries ago.