Ten year Anniversary of 9/11...

With the anniversary of 9/11 a mere hour and a half away, (like everyone else) I can't help but think back on everything that we have been through as a nation since that fateful day. The truth of the matter is, nations are just like individuals. And as individuals, most of us are born naive and hopeful and with a certain love of life that only a child can know. This naivity continues until one day something happens to rob us of that innocent bliss. For some of us tragedy strikes early in life which leads to a lifetime of psychiatric problems. For others, this innocence continues well into our adult years. But for most of us, something happens in our late teens or early 20s that robs us of our childhood innocence and thrusts us into the"real world." A broken heart, the death of a friend, diagnosis of a serious illness: these things happen and they change who we are. Once it has been done, it can't be undone and we realize that life is not all some fairy tale with a happy ending. There is a big world out there and eventually we realize that it does not revolve around us and we are not living in some bubble near it, but we are just a small part of it. For the United States of America (or at least for most Americans I know around my age) 9/11/01 was the day our nation grew up. We had to acknowledge that we were not some untouchable entity across a couple of oceans from where terrorists attacked. We were reachable. Before 9/11/01 most Americans I knew didn't even know what terrorism was, what it looked like or what it meant. Even if we did, it was some foreign concept that we had read about in a text book or in the news. It certainly was not something that we ever fathomed would become everyday vocabulary for us. For many of those my age we distinctly remember what the world was like pre-9/11. I was barely 17 when a group of terrorists took down the World Trade Center twin towers, killed a planeful of innocent Americans in a field, and slammed a plane into part of the Pentagon. Growing up in Baltimore and being a theater geek, I had been to NYC a million times. I remember the skyline with the towers and I distinctly remember my first trip back to New York when they were gone. I cried. Living in Pennsylvania for the past 8 years, I have made it over to Shanksville to the site of the crash. I cried then too. And then, there is the Pentagon. On 9/11/01, I had forgotten a notebook at home and called my mother to see if she could get it for me. She asked if I really needed it because the extra 5 minutes would cause her to sit in an additional 20-30 minutes of DC traffic on her way to work. I told her not to worry about it. You see, the Pentagon for me was a building I had been driven past a million times. Not only on all of our school trips (or family trips) to the monuments, memorials and museums, but also anytime I went to work with my mom for the day. My mom watched as Flight 77 descended toward the Pentagon on 9/11/01, but (because she did not go back to get my notebook) was far enough away by the time of impact. The events of 9/11/01 touched me personally and changed who I am. It made me care about things like "foreign policy" and world news. It also made me (and several thousands of other Americans) wake up and grow up and realize that the things that we do and the decisions that we make as a nation impact other people. Like the naive teenager that I was ten years ago, our nation was shocked into realizing that it's not all about US. If we want to be an international powerhouse then we have to be cognizant of the world around us and stop acting like the spoiled rich kids (especially now that we're not so rich anymore).