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Eighteen Years in the Shadow of the Twin Towers
We’ve changed fundamentally, and it’s high time we admit it
I was fifteen years old on September 11th, 2001. Growing up in a small town, I’d never been to New York City, let alone another country. Like most of the kids my age, I didn’t know what al-Qaeda was. I didn’t know the meaning of the word jihad. If you’d have asked me, I couldn’t have pointed out Afghanistan on a map.
At 8:46am on a beautiful Tuesday morning, that changed. As a nation, our collective consciousness changed in a way that it hadn’t since the explosion of the Challenger.
September 11th, for those who lived through it, is an event like the Challenger disaster, the Kennedy assassination or the attack on Pearl Harbor. We remember where we were when we first heard the news. For me, it came during geometry class. The teacher thought it was an accidental plane crash, so she didn’t stop class. Of course, this was before we all had cellphones, or social media, so none of us really knew much about what had happened until after school was over.
I don’t think any of us realized how much the events of that Tuesday would shape our lives, or our society in the years to come.
9/11 changed the country that I lived in. It changed the world I grew up in. It changed, in…
