I remember where I was when 9/11 happened. I was in my first period classroom. We were about to begin our Spanish lesson when the principle informed us on the intercom.
Most of us didn’t know what the World Trade Center was. We didn’t understand the magnitude of this terrorist act. We had no idea that the world would never be the same.
There was a change that occurred when the towers came down. We hadn’t seen an attack in the U.S. like this before. The world was thrown into a state of chaos. America was impervious to loss, or so we thought. We tried to bring about regime change in the Middle East; we were not successful. Recently, President Trump decimated ISIS; so, that’s good. We still see terrorism on the rise. Look at London. They have had hundreds of acid and knife attacks on the streets. There are no-go zones all over Europe. Paris had the awful attack at the Bataclan. How could we forget Charlie Hebdo? The list of terrorist attacks since the towers came down would be enumerable in this small piece. I merely try to bring to mind the mass pandemonium since September 11th.
I remember being upset by the death of thousands of Americans, but I couldn’t imagine the fallout. I remember my parents and other adults feeling the pain I couldn’t comprehend. It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware, but I was at a loss. I had never seen the adults in my world crumble en masse. That was the scariest thing of all.
This was a defining moment for my peer group. We were young adults just beginning to understand our place in the world. Now, the world had transformed within one morning. We were now living in a post 9/11 world.
Mass immigration has swept all over Europe. This is a result of the destabilization of the Middle East. Regime change proved impossible. We could not bring them our western values. Our liberty is not easily sold. We have a separation of Church and State that isn’t universally valued. They have Theocracies. Saudi Arabia has the death penalty for homosexuals; women just got the right to drive there as well. You must obey the rules of Ramadan in the streets of Iran; if you do not you will be punished. In Jordan, it is against the law to blasphemy against Allah. This is not how we live in the West.
Now more than ever we need to take a serious look at our culture. We don’t need to be blindly patriotic. We can be soberly patriotic. We can and are encouraged to criticize the stars and stripes. We can blasphemy. Women can vote, own property; speak their mind and drive. For all the things we can and should work on we’re living freely. That freedom is not without sacrifice, and we need to sacrifice in order to keep it. We can’t take anything for granted anymore.
I remember being young and not being concerned with much of anything. Now, I am concerned with everything. I am concerned with the Universities; I am concerned with journalists; I am concerned with Hollywood, and the mainstream narrative. There was a time before 9/11 that I was a boy. After 9/11, I was thrust into an adult world, but I was still just a boy. Now, I’m a man and I wonder how the next generation will deal with these global politics. They did not know a world before America was brought to it’s knees, and it stayed there for a long moment. I wonder if they’ll understand how precious this American experiment has been. I hope that they’ll read and investigate the truth. Maybe, they’ll understand that America is worth fighting for, and that no nation is perfect. This is our home, and we need to value this freedom we were born into.
My family has been my compass for me to navigate the fog of information. My grandfather came here as an immigrant. He lost a whole family to the Nazis. He even fought Nazis as a partisan. He met my grandmother in a displaced person’s camp. He came to the states legally, and became an egg handler. He raised three children, loved all things America and was grateful for this safe haven. Jews that had stayed in Poland after WWII met horrible fates from 1944-1946. My grandfather, Abe, was spared that horror. We in the United States are spared that brand of horror. My generation was thrust into an adult world when those planes struck the two towers. Now, we’re well into our adulthood, but we haven’t forgotten that terrible day. We’ll all be asked by the next generation what it was like when our hearts froze over as we watched Americans jump to their deaths. I have an idea of what I’ll say. I’ll say that it was terrible, tragic and sad. I’ll say that I remember seeing wet faces, red eyes, screens depicting grey clouds and hellfire. I’ll tell them to value the stars and stripes like my grandfather, Abe, did. I’ll never forget that day. I’ll never forget my grandfather. I never forget how lucky I am to be in the U.S.A.