Monthly Archives: September 2011

I remember that fateful day as well as most of you.  Ten years ago today, I was in the fifth grade.  I remember walking to class down the long central hallway of the cookie-cutter public elementary school.  Class had not yet started but everyone was already in their rooms.  I was running a little bit late, but I cannot remember why.  I stepped across the threshold into the classroom and I saw the television was on.  We never had the TV on.  It was tuned to CNN.  A video of a smoking skyscraper filled the screen.  I didn’t know what the World Trade Center was at the time.  I guess I had heard of the Twin Towers, but I was more or less unfamiliar with the New York City skyline.  And then it happened.  I saw the plane fly into the building.  I think it may have been the second plane, or it could have been video of the first again.  Something exploded in the tower and smoke billowed out.  I had no idea what was going on.  That’s about all I remember.

That day has defined my generation and those younger than me.  We have grown up in a post-9/11 world.  We are accustomed (if still annoyed) by increased security measures.  We cannot remember a time when the world was not in some semblance of war.  The inflated and often inflammatory rhetoric that has characterized American politics since those days is all we have ever known.  Peacetime looks like wartime — there is no distinction.  We have grown up under the fear of possible terror attacks.  I remember when the plane crashed in a New York City suburb after 9/11, we all worried it was another terrorist attack.  The televisions were on again and we thought for a moment we had entered the dismal second act of a tragedy.  I remember when I was either in New York City or Washington, D.C., hearing about the evacuation of a major train station because someone left a bag unattended.  I remember the attacks in the United Kingdom, in Spain, in India, everywhere.  Since 9/11, we lost a sense of security.

I remember too riding the tide of pro-American sentiment after the attacks.  I can see President George W. Bush addressing the nation in my head now as clearly as I could when I was still that young.  I remember looking up to him as our leader, protector of the free world.  I remember the beginning of the war on terrorism that began in Afghanistan.  I remember supporting it, as much as any child could.  I remember these events as my first contact with Islam, too.  I remember all of this changing with Iraq.  We were sitting in a restaurant after church when the news outlets first started airing footage of the bombings.  It was night vision video, streaks of green and white falling from the sky on Baghdad.  Explosions rocked the cameras — there was no accompanying sound.  I think that was the day I became a pacifist.  It is out of this confusing, tumultuous, and disturbing period that I became who I am today.  Read the rest of this entry →