Before today ends, I absolutely have to write about the fact that today marked the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.
I’ve told my personal story of that day a decade ago, on the 15th anniversary of the events, so I won’t rehash it here. What I do find interesting is that, in the time building up to today, the event has had a strong effect on me again. It always has — many of us who were around for the event likely have some level of PTSD as a result of it, even if we were separated by a thousand miles or more and only saw it on TV. We still were there, present in the time that the tragedy happened. The scope was not something we were accustomed to, and as a then 16 year old who had grown up in the seemingly safe post Cold War world of the 90’s, the fact that anything like that could happen was simply unthinkable…. and, things changed. Our world changed.
The optimism of the new millennium? Gone. Instead came the longest continuous single military operation in United States history with an entire second war happening concurrently with the first one, government surveillance on citizens becoming the norm and just… a weird feeling that never left.
It’s been 25 years. The World Trade Center site is now, around the area of the towers, a memorial to the victims, with a new 1 World Trade Center standing tall in a new business complex that’s, oddly enough, only lacking a proper 2 World Trade Center building. Capitalism, of course, can never be stopped and that prime real estate needed to be re-developed as soon as possible, after all.
The Pentagon and the flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania both have their own memorials, with the Pentagon long having been repaired. This, all, is natural, of course. We have to strike a balance between remembering and honoring the past, and moving forward with all of our lives.
As for the event itself, primarily the very well documented New York City aspect of it, I’ve watched countless hours of footage and studied as best as my likely PTSD will allow, and still, I want to both know more and forget it ever happened. It’s a strange feeling to have; one I may need to go into details on in a future piece. I have a lot I’ve wanted to say.. to write… about this event, but I have put it by the wayside. Maybe in the upcoming months I’ll come back to this subject and share more thoughts, where applicable. Obviously, it’s a tough subject to write about, but, maybe, a quarter of a century later, it’s time for me to go into more detail on yet another major piece of world history; just, one I experienced in the moment like the rest of the world.
For now, I end what would otherwise have been an absolutely normal day were it not for the fact that today happens to be 9,131 days, or 25 years, since the defining event of the 21st century.
Take care out there…
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