story1587.xml

story1587.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-08-30

I was a junior at high school when it happened. The principal announced that a plane had rammed into one of the Twin Towers. A moment of silence... No deaths, no destruction. I was glad. I was glad that some terrorists had launched something into the center of Amerikkkan capitalist greed. I yelled out "Right on!" and, though that may seem unbelievable now, a few students joined in. I hated the Twin Towers. They represented all that was wrong in the world, something that caused so much pain and suffering in the name of the dollar. Not long later I learned that BOTH towers were hit and collapsed AND the Pentagon was hit AND a hijacked plane had crashed somewhere. Fear was contagious---this was war. People spoke of bin Laden and taking out the towelheads. My friends and I spoke that day of how and why this had happened; the consensus was that because the terrorists weren't just after our freedom, and because the US likely wouldn't stop doing what we suspected the terrorists were REALLY after us for, the future would likely be a bleak one with just more incidents like this.Nevertheless, we weren't immune to the shock that everyone had and it set in on me sometime before noon. The rest of the school day was pretty normal---people hung out, kissed their girlfriends, fell asleep in class---but then we came home to televisions replaying the crash over and over and over. From an infinite number of angles. The explosion got numbing and after a few hours the TV was turned off. I slept that night saddened, yet I also realized that this was the moment young "anarchists" like me had been waiting for. Something we had hated was taken out in grand fashion for all the world to see; now NOBODY could be blind to just how evil my country is. Yet I felt no comfort from that thought. I just felt sickened. Now it's almost a year later and we've chosen to get back to normal instead of learning something. We still shop at the chain store of our choice, we still watch "Friends" reruns, we still take our lives for granted. September 11th should have been the day of realization for us. But it wasn't and I worry that, in light of what the world is like now, it was an opportunity we couldn't afford to miss.