A look back at 9/11/2001 (Has it really been 10 years?)

It feels weird to be here at ten years after the event. I hate to call it a special occasion or some important moment, but that is what it is. To be frank, I don't wish to talk about the grandiose or the political; just how much I think the world has changed or if I think "the terrorists won". But I do think it is important to look back and attempt to make sense of what happened that day, because I certainly did not foresee anything or really had any clue of the bigger picture.


Though, if you want to see the bigger picture (and I certainly enjoyed taking a look back to a period where I, like many other 13 year-olds were ignorant of the outside world), The Atlantic has done a fantastic job at the bigger picture with photos of the news just a week before, as well as photos from that day and a look at the decade since, and how much has changed.

For anyone who even witnessed 9/11 in one form or another, they remember enough of that day and what they were doing when they saw those images on the television or heard the news from the radio or even heard the hushed whispers from the adults. Because if you were a few years from my age ten years ago, you probably though it was just another boring Tuesday at school until you found out something beyond impossible had just happened.

For myself, it was exactly that until 3PM that sunny school day. I could remember nothing from that day between 8:30 until 3. As I got in the car to go home, my parents turned around and asked me if I had heard about the news - the World Trade Center in New York had been hit by planes. Instantly, I recognized what they were talking about, because a few summers ago we had just visited New York as part of a trip down the East Coast of the U.S. We had been up on top of the tower, taking pictures. We had been in the elevators feeling our ears pop as it carried us to the top of one of the observation deck. Certainly, after I had been told that people flew planes into them I thought it was beyond belief. You mean like in a movie right? It was an accident right? No it couldn't have been if two struck within so close to another that same day.  Didn't people in the movies mostly use planes full of people as hostages and ask for demands and fly them somewhere safe and out of the way?

It wasn't until I saw the recordings my parents made that I finally saw the images of the attack. It certainly couldn't be real, right? Then we switched to the live news on CNN. Nope, it was for real now, hours after the fact. Still, the news networks kept replaying those same images of the towers being hit, their eventual collapse and the aftermath with people running away from the dust clouds. The Pentagon too? We had passed it on our vacation that same year, but now damaged from being struck by a plane.

The next few days, all I can remember is being glued in front of the TV watching the news if I wasn't at school. Footage of rescue workers trying to find people under all that debris. I can never seem to recall any of it unless someone showed me a picture, triggering a rush of all those images. I certainly wasn't concentrated on the speculative side of things - the who's and the why's were definitely beyond my comprehension at that point of my life. Either way, I was certain enough that this was the defining moment of my generation and after that day, the world would become a much different place. Perhaps, like many other generations in history who witnessed a similar world-changing event felt very much the same, and again in subsequent ten-year anniversaries of it, for good or for worse. It would be hard to argue that 9/11 was at all similar to anything in even the recent past because for the most part, it sure looked like uncharted territory from where I was standing.