9/11 Rewrote Our Lives in Ways We Are Only Beginning to Comprehend
The ritual remains the same each year: everyone recalls where they were and what they were doing when they learned terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001.
For those of us who made a political transition from Left to Right over the last decade, this reminiscence has the potential for an extra shot of sorrow. We must remember not just where we were, but who we were and how 9/11 affected us at the time.
And it’s on this latter point that I really wish I could forget. But I still have my journals from that period and a copy of the op/ed column I wrote for the school paper that morning. I presented the naive, do-gooder “liberal” message of the time: we should not pay any attention to the ideas of the crazy people who committed this crime, we should just focus on mourning the victims. Hijacking the media to broadcast their message and forcing us to consider it is exactly what the terrorists want. And we shouldn’t take our enemies seriously, because (as the media experts and the president assured us and I would later argue, too) they were fringe extremists misinterpreting a benign religion of peace that posed no real threat to America.
Eleven years later and I no longer advocate that we should ignore evil ideas. And I’m embarrassed of the person I used to be who did.
So on this 9/11 instead I look forward, and pose different questions: if 9/11 had never happened, then where would you be today? Or rather, who would you be today?
Don’t forget all of the future generations that will never be born because of the deaths on 9/11, either. Surely that’s as great an effect as all the children who were born because of it.
9/11 did not change me politically. I had long been alternately skeptical of and disgusted with the Western Left, ever since I absorbed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago one summer in high school. And I had long followed the dreary litany of Islamic terrorism, bombings and hijackings, from the 70s onwards. When 9/11 happened, I knew before hearing any announcement that it was probably Osama bin Laden, because he was responsible for the attacks on the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I had visited Kenya before, and loved the warm friendly people there, so that attack was doubly atrocious to me. On 9/11, watching Muslims party in the streets, and proggs exclaim “How terrible! But…” simply confirmed me more solidly in my opinions.
How about all the people who joined the armed forces because of those events? (I have at least two family members who did.) And how about all the people who became legal citizens due in part or because of those events?
The events did have a changing effect on my political opinions and religious beliefs. More recent events have further changed them.
I’m sorry, I meant to say he WASNT happy after he did it. he felt awful.
First, it’s hard to believe that 11 years have passed since that terrible day when millions of us watched on TV as our world, as we thought we knew it, changed before our eyes. The impossible took place piece by piece and I still wonder, as many do, if the plot that unfolded was the real truth or something more sinister lurked behind the scenes. If the fruitless wars in the Middle East didn’t teach us something, most likely, the events that day didn’t either. We did learn that many military people are not automatically geniuses because of their high ranks, on the contrary, they have been riding the coattails of influential politicians for decades. Furthermore, it is still possible that 9/11 was carefully manipulated drama, costing thousands of lives, to hide losses in the trillions to greedy leaders. We may never know the cast involved. We do know that Iraq was a mistake costing us treasure and the loss of too many young people. More importantly, we learned the true nature of our enemies in the East and that history, as taught to them, is an on-going fable. The most important lesson being we should never elect anybody with extreme beliefs different from our own and expect that person to put them aside.