eleven years

every year, we americans take this day to pay respects to the lost lives of innocent people. we honor the service of our policemen, firemen, and soldiers while recognizing the tragedy of the september 11th attacks.

tragedy is a funny thing. it brings people together. funerals bring families together; this event brought our nation together.

my physics teacher told our class about the 9/11 memorial at the pentagon. there's a little bench for each person who died, with those lost in the airplane facing inwards and those killed inside the pentagon facing outwards. and the worst part is that they're arranged by age. you can see all these different people, ages three to eighty-seven, tied indiscriminately together by nothing but this tragedy.

i partake in the annual recognitions, the ceremonies, the moments of silence for everything america lost on this day eleven years ago. but it's taken me a long time to understand its significance more than nominally.

i was six on the day of the attacks, old enough to remember what happened but too young to comprehend the gravity of the situation. i'll never be able to understand it as today's adults do. as a sheltered child of the suburbs, it took me years before death became to me not merely a fact, but a feeling; years before the humanity and the grief of lost innocence sunk in--and by that i mean not only the death of innocent people, but also the end of a naively trusting era that shattered along with the windows of the world trade center. we kids of the Y-generation have grown up in cynicism. racial profiling and the TSA are not particularly ominous new installments into our society, but rather facts of life that are unfortunately uttered in the same breath more often than not. airport privacy is harder to come by than the internet variety. war and shootings and bashar assad are nothing but headlines, numbing us from the humanity of death. how many more colorado movie killings and wisconsin sikh attacks can we grieve and process?

but if personal emotional reconciliation took years, understanding how 9/11 attacked our nation's identity took longer still. to six-year-old me, the world trade center and the pentagon were vague abstractions. nationalistic abstractions, certainly, but still abstractions. arguably, those two structures are little more than abstractions for many adults, too, but that's aside from the point. i'm not sure how many years of american history classes and civics activities it took for me to even begin to grasp our country's role in globalization, our nation's pride in our greatness, and how the world trade center represented american faith, faith that was destroyed.

i don't know how long it will take to rebuild that faith. i can't say that we'll ever succeed in doing so. but today is the day when we remember to try, to bring ourselves together with the memory of tragedy and to find hope from surviving difficulty. because that's what we need now in order to give ourselves the strength to do the right thing.

hope.