Ten Years

In three days it will have been an entire decade since the event that will remain seared into my generation's memory occurred. I'm speaking, of course, about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It feels weird to say that it's been ten years, because I'm twenty-five years old now, but I can recall what it was like to be fifteen during that day and yet, almost half my life has passed since that moment.

Ten years...it's a long time. This post could go a number of ways really; it could turn on anti or pro war platform, as ten years after the attacks we are still engaged in a war in Afghanistan that began in retaliation against Al Quaeda. It could turn into an attack on the anti-American actions of Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has disinvited the clergy and the men and women who risked their lives to save others on that horrible day. It could speak to the death of Osama bin Laden; whose life being ended will not bring back the nearly three thousand dead from that day. It could speak to the fact that the United States is so obsessed with being secure, that it isn't the same country that it was on that day.

There are so many things that could be said about the events of that Tuesday morning. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about it however, is that for a brief period, the world stood still and mostly unified. The attacks were not only on the United States of America. The World Trade Center was a truly global target in its handling of finances from around the planet and more than ninety separate nations would lose citizens in the space of only a handful of hours.

Condolences flew in from around the world as quickly as denunciations of what had occured; offers of aid arrived from every corner of the world. For the first time in United States history, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights in our airspace, leading to the landing or redirection out of country of every aircraft above the contintental United States. Citizens of neighboring countries didn't complain however, but instead opened their doors for people who would be displaced until the borders were reopened.

It is a moment that has been burned into the national psyche in a way that few others have been. I know that among people older than myself I've often heard it described in the same vein as "I still remember 9/11, just like I remember where I was when Kennedy was shot" or "I still remember 9/11, just like I remember where I was when Pearl Harbor was bombed".

Personally? I remember and I'll post where I was and what I was doing at the end of this. But what comes to my mind first when I recall 9/11 isn't the ash clouds or the destroyed buildings; it's not the ruins that remained at Ground Zero; it's not the Pentagon where more people died than did in the Oklahoma City bombing; it's not a field in Pennsylvania. What I remember first is a single snapshot I once saw of a man falling to his death. He was far from the only one too; what was it like in the World Trade Center, knowing that you were going to die because you couldn't get out because you were cut off? Did these people agonize with the decision to jump or not as flame and smoke poured into their floors?

Where was I though? Sitting in Keyboarding as the second plane hit when we turned it on, everyone almost immediately realizing it couldn't be an accident. The announcements drowning out the television because the office didn't realize anything was going on. Going to science class as something was being said about a fire at the Pentagon and the teacher making us take a test because she wasn't going to let us out of it for some sort of accident. The use of television being banned in the school while we took that test. And then when being picked up, finding out about what had happened in my day of being cut off from the outside world at school: the twin towers I had once looked out from were gone, the Pentagon was partially destroyed, and a fourth aircraft had gone down in Pennsylvania. We didn't know how many people were dead, or if there was more coming in the following days.

Ten years and the memories are still fresh. Ten years and we're still stuck in a quagmire overseas. Ten years and the country is perhaps at its most divided and partisan since the 1960s.

Ten years and so much has changed; the world has not frozen in time. Life has gone on. Technology has continued to evolve, people have continued to marry, kids are still being born.

It hit me the other day that the kids in elementary school today weren't even born when the September 11th attacks occured. For them, it will be much like the events of the Cold War were for my generation; at most a fleeting memory from early in our lives, but more likely just another thing to be read in the history books that seems like it happened a long time ago, but whose impact is still imperceptibly felt.

Ten years and the march of history goes on.