Friday marked the eight-year anniversary of the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
September 11, 2001: the day 19 men armed with box cutters took the first two flights in the country and turned them into missiles destroying two icons of American security.
That day still haunts me. We are the Sept. 11 generation. I watched the towers fall when I was barely in high school. Most of you probably were still in grade school.
I actually saw the second plane hit in real time.
I was walking down the hall, when someone yelled, “A plane hit the WTC.” I ran to the closest TV just as the second plane hit. In that instant, everything changed. This was no accident. I had never seen anything like it before.
And even more frightening, neither had any of the adults huddled around the screen looking just as terrified and clueless as we were.
There are moments that define us. Sept. 11 was my generation’s moment. The new millennium was supposed to be a time of peace, where we would leave the brutal 20th century and the horrific violent centuries before it behind.
This millennium, it turned out, was not going to be free of the same cycle of human violence and war.
Our basic assumptions changed that day. America at 7 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001 was living in a time of relative peace and prosperity.
America at 7 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2009 sees itself in two wars — one ambiguous, the other with no clear ending. Its economy has fallen off a cliff, and post-Katrina, its government is still incapable of responding to citizens after disasters.
We are not living in the same country we did eight years ago.
I was moved by the story about the local firefighters who traveled to ground zero to assist their fallen brothers. To hear them tell how people were trying to give them their first-class tickets just to help in some way breaks my heart. After Sept. 11, for a brief moment, we were all Americans.
And our leader, chosen by God, fate and a crooked Supreme Court decision, told us to go back to our lives. George W. Bush and his administration had a country united and he said the most important thing to do was “go shopping.”
To shop — and to be afraid. Sept. 11, they told us, showed us nothing was safe.
The Bush administration spent the next four years color-coding, fear mongering and hyping the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (9/11 times a thousand).
While Franklin D. Roosevelt told this nation once, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the Bush administration told us to duct tape our windows and report suspicious persons to the Department of Homeland Security. Less “the smoking gun comes in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Sept. 11 was used as a pretext for war with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11; a war that has now killed more Americans than Sept. 11.
Sept. 11 was used as a pretext to pass the Patriot Act, establish Guantanamo, tap everyone from you to your grandmother’s phone and subvert the Constitution the way they saw fit. Sept. 11 was used as a pretext for a broader war, a war not against a country but against an idea: “Terror.”
In this war, Sept. 11 was used as a pretext for torturing prisoners; using techniques we prosecuted others for as war crimes. Sept. 11 is the pretext used to justify why we are at war in Afghanistan, where last month was the single bloodiest month for Americans in the entire conflict, despite the fact we have never captured Osama Bin Laden.
President Obama just extended the National Emergency that went into effect right after Sept. 11. Eight years later we are still in an emergency.
And the country that was united afterwards has about one-third of its people who don’t believe the president was born here and another one-third who thinks the last administration was responsible for the attacks.
Sept. 11 was a great American tragedy that changed everything. Sometimes life doesn’t give you answers, it just gives you more questions. What did we learn from Sept. 11? Why did it even happen in the first place? And dear God, what will we do if we are attacked again?
O’Connor is a senior studying political science and philosophy.
