9/11 - Paradigm Shifted
Here is an entry I sent in for the J & C for their reflection on 9/11 that somehow got lost in the mail. I post it here for your reflection.
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It was SAT week at Frankfort High School. We were just finishing the first section of the day when our teacher interrupted to announce that the Twin Towers had been attacked.
I don't believe there was a student in the classroom who ever took her seriously. She was a mousey little woman who sneezed like a dying kazoo. In all her earnestness, we still couldn't help but think it was a strange practical joke. Yet as soon as we left school, we knew that to say this was no joke was the understatement of the century.
I spent the rest of the day at home, watching THE footage repeating endlessly. After a few hours of that, my mind had finally become de-numbed enough to realize that my future no longer seemed certain. My thoughts kept turning to the possibility of a war, a war I might become involved in. (War on Iraq was declared almost two years later - on my birthday. Talk about dates to remember.) There was no escaping the news, either. My father would watch the news into the early hours of the morning for many months to come. Now, certainly, we see how much this event has become a part of our psyche, almost a given.
It is deceivingly easy to think of life as one long unbroken stream, when in reality the events in it have shattered it into a million pieces. Some of these events are so small to us as to be unoticable, but each life has one or two hinge, in which life takes an almost entirely new direction, so big that we know it. 9/11 was a date that altered a high-schoolers status quo forever. Suddenly the important issues weren't getting a car or eating at the Milky Way for lunch. Our minds were turned to matters like foreign affairs, patriotism, courage, religion, even death. The Eleventh of September was the day where we unwillingly became adults.