I remember watching television with my father on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. All day long, footage of the flaming buildings kept flashing across the screen, but I never looked away, even when I grew tired of seeing it. I was paying penance for all of my past years of blissful ignorance. There inevitably came a point during the day when my disbelief faded, and soon it grew into anger and bewilderment. Who would do this? What would motivate anybody to kill so indiscriminately? How the fuck did a bunch of zealot yahoos manage to kill three thousand people with a couple of box cutters? It was surreal to the point of absurdity.
By early evening, news reporters began to speculate on the possible origins of the hijackers. Almost simultaneously, the networks came to an unofficial consensus, and they were all showing maps of Afghanistan. When my father saw the various networks’ graphics, he stood up and left the room. He came back a minute later holding a dusty globe that our family had long forgotten. He sat next to me, slowly rotated the globe, and placed his finger on Afghanistan. That was the country that we would hold accountable, he told me. War was declared on American soil, but we would end it on theirs. I nodded without a word and turned my eyes to the north. According to the globe, Russia was still calling itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It’s funny how much the world can change without your realizing it.
Since that day, the globe has never left the living room. I don’t always stop to look at it, but I’ve never forgotten that it’s there. The world has been a different place since the attack, and it will continue to change in the future, just as it always has. I appreciate that fact now more than ever. Since that day, I’ve chosen to stop ignoring the world.
It’s so odd. When my grandma talks about how the world was like when she was a little girl growing up, it seems like a fairyland compared to how it is now. She said she could leave her front door wide open all night and nothing would have happened. It’s amazing how much the world can change in one person’s lifetime. I’m afraid that when I get to be my grandma’s age that the world will be that much worse from what it is now. What horrors will my children have to live through? Will they even make it to adulthood? The 9-11 attack terrifies me because, whether I’m being pessimistic or not, I only see the world getting worse. And getting worse than something like that is horrifying.