About five years ago, I was still in casts from a recent surgery. I didn't know the date then, it was early on the West Coast of America. I went downstairs to play video games.
I turned on the TV. It was tuned to Fox News. And so it was that I was introduced to the day of September 11, 2001.
Like many Americans, the TV stayed on the news. I saw countless replays of the buildings getting hit, and after a little time, the collapse of the twin towers. There were reports of Flight 93 and there was footage of the Pentagon burning.
I was (and to an extent, I still am) in a state of shock. I knew that people had died, the fact was that it made my stomach turn into all sorts of odd knots. It was no one I knew, but that didn't seem to matter. What mattered was that America had been attacked.
Before that time, I hadn't really paid much attention to terrorism. It was out there, but I didn't fully understand what was happening. Terrorism was a crime in those days, not a war. 9/11 changed all that. What it did for me was to put an exclamation mark on the word "terrorism." It opened the eyes of a tolerant nation to an intolerant belief: that the West was the cause of all evil.
The most horrible thing I saw that day was when the TV switched to the Mexican TV station. They showed images of people leaping out of windows, just falling. It's one thing to see buildings come down, it's another to see people come down. I'm certain that the images I saw that day will haunt me the rest of my life. Months afterward, I noted that I looked at a clock and it would be 9:11. Just seeing that was enough to bring the knots back.
These last few years, I've avoided remembering 9/11. It just brings the knots back and all the terrible memories. I think it is time to look back and remember it all. Americans shouldn't forget what happened on that day, it is imperative that we don't. We realized how dangerous it is to ignore threats, instead of addressing them.
Never forget.
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