This Was Ours.
Every generation has a moment that defines it. Where everyone remembers where they were, who they were with, how they were told, what they saw, what they felt.
I was 15 and getting ready for school. I heard it on the radio and went downstairs to see if it was real. It was one of those things that you hear and think there's no way. There's no way someone flew a plane into a building that big and you have to see it before it becomes real.
And seeing it made it so much worse. Because it was real. It did really happen. It was happening while we were watching. An entire country, the whole world watching.
That was the day we saw the absolute worst and best of humanity. I think we did anyway.
The worst is clear, until it isn't. (But this is just my opinion. It's my blog, it's the world as I see it.) That that kind of hatred lives in us is incredible. And by us, I do mean a collective world "us". Our relationship with the Middle East has been tense at best and that a group of men would be raised from childhood to kill themselves in commission of this kind of act against people they didn't know, who didn't deserve this, is astonishing. That hatred is just incredible and I can't understand it. Except that we, and this is a collective world "we" feel it for them too. And we can say it was in result of this attack, but I think history shows a different story. But in our generation, they attacked us with no warning and, seemingly, no provocation. They don't deserve our sympathy or our consideration. We don't look at them as people protecting their beliefs, fighting against what they see as wrong, we see them as the ones who wronged us. And we hate that. We hate them. It's amazing.
But then we saw a subdued nature and a caring concern that can only happen in the wake of such a great tragedy. And it may not have lasted these last 10 years, but I felt a difference. In how people spoke, the way they acted towards others, towards themselves, their mannerisms, everything changed. The absolute best of humanity came out as people pulled together to make sense of this day, this event. To care for each other. To love each other.
I think that the truth of who we are is evident every day but especially when things are painful. I have to believe in the good in the world because there's more of it than there is bad. That's just the truth. We make mistakes, as evidenced when in May this year, and in stark contrast to the support we saw and felt in 2001, the US Army had the opportunity to bring a form of justice to the person responsible for this act and the country celebrated the death of Osama Bin Laden.
In that moment, in that celebration, we were so much less than the best of humanity. I understood the celebration then, and I understand it now, but that's who we are. The people who celebrate the death of another human being because we hated them. And that's terrifying. I'm not saying that wasn't the right call to make, to kill him rather than try and set up a trial, that it wasn't gratifying in its own perverse sense of justice, I'm not even saying that it wasn't deserved. I can't say that because I don't know. But the response was unfortunate. And I wondered then, I still do actually, if the moment just took us and it was a mob mentality kind of response or if we are the ones who can celebrate the death of another person regardless of who they are, what they've done, how reprehensible we find them to be. I hope we look back on that moment and regret it because we're more than that. We should be at least.
It's true; we will never forget. But I hope we can learn from it. That we remember and continue making the lives of those we lost mean something. Every generation has a moment that defines it. This was ours.
I was 15 and getting ready for school. I heard it on the radio and went downstairs to see if it was real. It was one of those things that you hear and think there's no way. There's no way someone flew a plane into a building that big and you have to see it before it becomes real.
And seeing it made it so much worse. Because it was real. It did really happen. It was happening while we were watching. An entire country, the whole world watching.
That was the day we saw the absolute worst and best of humanity. I think we did anyway.
The worst is clear, until it isn't. (But this is just my opinion. It's my blog, it's the world as I see it.) That that kind of hatred lives in us is incredible. And by us, I do mean a collective world "us". Our relationship with the Middle East has been tense at best and that a group of men would be raised from childhood to kill themselves in commission of this kind of act against people they didn't know, who didn't deserve this, is astonishing. That hatred is just incredible and I can't understand it. Except that we, and this is a collective world "we" feel it for them too. And we can say it was in result of this attack, but I think history shows a different story. But in our generation, they attacked us with no warning and, seemingly, no provocation. They don't deserve our sympathy or our consideration. We don't look at them as people protecting their beliefs, fighting against what they see as wrong, we see them as the ones who wronged us. And we hate that. We hate them. It's amazing.
But then we saw a subdued nature and a caring concern that can only happen in the wake of such a great tragedy. And it may not have lasted these last 10 years, but I felt a difference. In how people spoke, the way they acted towards others, towards themselves, their mannerisms, everything changed. The absolute best of humanity came out as people pulled together to make sense of this day, this event. To care for each other. To love each other.
I think that the truth of who we are is evident every day but especially when things are painful. I have to believe in the good in the world because there's more of it than there is bad. That's just the truth. We make mistakes, as evidenced when in May this year, and in stark contrast to the support we saw and felt in 2001, the US Army had the opportunity to bring a form of justice to the person responsible for this act and the country celebrated the death of Osama Bin Laden.
In that moment, in that celebration, we were so much less than the best of humanity. I understood the celebration then, and I understand it now, but that's who we are. The people who celebrate the death of another human being because we hated them. And that's terrifying. I'm not saying that wasn't the right call to make, to kill him rather than try and set up a trial, that it wasn't gratifying in its own perverse sense of justice, I'm not even saying that it wasn't deserved. I can't say that because I don't know. But the response was unfortunate. And I wondered then, I still do actually, if the moment just took us and it was a mob mentality kind of response or if we are the ones who can celebrate the death of another person regardless of who they are, what they've done, how reprehensible we find them to be. I hope we look back on that moment and regret it because we're more than that. We should be at least.
It's true; we will never forget. But I hope we can learn from it. That we remember and continue making the lives of those we lost mean something. Every generation has a moment that defines it. This was ours.
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