what terror looks like to a post 9/11 millennial

(TW: terror, cultural disparities. Read at your own risk! *Not finished yet* Sorry if I offend anyone!)

The day is the 11th of September, a school day for some, work for many, and a life changing one for all.

The morning still cold, dark, and dewy, I am lying in my mother’s bed because I fear lying in my own. I am four years old, not quite yet in preschool, not quite yet ready to wake for the day to begin. I vaguely remember being awoken by the sound of a female newscaster’s voice blaring through the television, and listening intently to my mother’s hesitant silence.

Patches of my memory include flashes of blurry news screens, filled with images of dusty buildings and runaway planes. Little did I know that over the next twenty four hours, my world and millions of others would drastically change--and a particular word would hover in my mind like a specter:

Terrorist.

Bombarded with images and sounds of death, filling our consciousnesses with fear, watching each other move would be the routine in the coming days. Panic would be the country’s reaction to destruction. Some would respond to the violence with violence, targeting innocent people. Who could have known that it would only took 17 minutes to change the world?

But this is all I remember about terror in the year 2001. Other than that, my year was filled with spice girls, powerpuff girls, purple ketchup, and dreams. The extent of my Americanism went only as far as my morning routine of standing with classmates, placing my right hand over my heart, and blindly pledging my life to a complicated country and a God I would eventually abandon.

I didn’t know what it meant to be targeted for my beliefs, I had never seen the hatred that lingered behind scathing eyes, nor heard the voices that falsely accused groups of people, causing their eventual condemnation. I didn’t know what fear truly was because I was shielded from it.

I was a sheep, and once again, my knowledge of these happenings only extended as far as my tongue could pronounce their names. When I was ten years old, I asked my father what he thought about “EYE-Rack” and “EYE-Ran” and “A-Rabs”, when at once he interrupted me and told me to pronounce things the “right way”. Telling me to instead say, Eh-Reb, Eee-Rahk, and Eee-Rahn. This action was when my view of the world began to change, this was where I learned that everything said in The News cannot be believed.

And it would very well be that each time I tried to find information about the topic, I ended up scrolling to my oblivion in dense articles with big words in WikiLeaks, strange conspiratorial websites, and in effect, my own confusion. Even with learned individuals, such as teachers and adult mentors, conversations always resulted in awkward hesitation, and then cyclical questions about my own knowledge of the topic, or “nonpartisan” tangents about media influence and more.

Never would I be allowed to understand a war so tense, nor find a succinct answer, so I eventually gave up looking. My only reliable source became the impassioned spoutings of debaters through sources such as Fox News and CNN, and thus I would wander the world with half-baked knowledge of my own country. I wouldn’t understand why I had to hate certain individuals, criticize policies I did not understand, nor why I couldn’t say some words in public or on planes--I just knew that I had to or else I’d get in a lot of trouble. It would get to the point that an unnamed fear would make my heart tremble whenever I’d see someone wearing a piece of “religious cloth” on their heads regardless of whether they were my cab drivers, they were my classmates, or my neighbors.

And then in 11th grade, my definition of terror changed when I learned American history. Terror, it seemed, was a convoluted and subjective term, which changes over time. No longer did the “average terrorist” live on foreign soil, but some have walked the very ground I walk on, breathed the same air as me, felt the same sun as me.

They were those who rifled nightclubs and churches, those who bombed marathons, those who wore red, those who wore blue, wore white hoods and burned crosses, wore police suits, named Bin Laden and Tsarnaev, Meserhle and Wilson, Mateen and Roof, ISIS and--

So many names that I have learned to remember but not recite on planes, even though I still don’t the hatred in which they breed. But even still, it hurts to say these aloud because they feel like spears in my mouth, and remind me of innocent lives they have stolen.

These days, terror seems to lurk in every corner, and there is no telling of where it will come from. And as confusing as this piece may be to you, just think of the nineteen years of confusion I’ve been living. I wish to gain perspective in a world seemingly rife with panic and violence. I wish that everyone could get along. I wish to know the world my parents knew.

I do not know why I wrote this, but I feel that this perspective needed to be shared. My heart goes out to the victims of terror around the world.