Author's Note: Consciously straying from my usual ranting and raving about all things dating, I felt compelled to draft something retrospective during this time of reflection upon the tenth anniversary (we need to come up with a more sorrowful word than "anniversary," it has such a celebratory tone) of September 11, 2001. Fear not, I'll be back to social shenanigans in no time.
I remember the tenth of September. I was rapidly approaching my twenty-first birthday and had recently returned to college for my third year. I was two-hundred miles away from home, but was reveling in the freedom of distance while secretly fearing the upcoming realities of adulthood around the corner.
I had spent my first twenty years paying little attention to things outside of our nation's borders, hell, even inside them. Probably like most teenagers, I had haphazardly voted in my first presidential election a year or so before, feeling a small internal victory that my candidate of choice had succeeded with little more to offer for rationale for why he'd received my vote other than his party affiliation and name recognition. I had a brief memory of sitting in my parents' Chevette waiting for gas in a ridiculously long line in 1991 and my father mentioning something about Iraq, a country I'd never heard of, Saddam Hussein and Operation Desert Storm. The connection to the line at the gas station was not made by that ten-year-old version of me, and all I knew was that I had to use the bathroom. By twenty, I knew that evil existed in the world; I remembered my grandfather sharing stories about Pearl Harbor and how the entire country mourned the losses there and during World War II, but that seemed so distant, both historically and geographically, that it had never entered my realm of consciousness. On September 10, 2001, had it ever crossed my mind, I considered myself and all of my fellow Americans protected by the bubble of the Atlantic and Pacific.
No comments:
Post a Comment