Ten Years Later, It Feels Closer Than Ever

It has been ten years since terrorists attacked the United States by flying two planes into the Twin Towers in New York City. I always viewed this day as a horrifying tragedy, but after watching a documentary filmed on the day of the attack, from both inside the building and outside with the firefighters, it feels more personal than ever. It is no longer a historical event that marked the beginning of a war that has lasted over a decade, but I suddenly see that day for what it really is: an attack on humanity, an attack on America, and an attack on me. I truly believe that the fact that these two filmmakers were documenting the firefighters on that day, and were therefore able to capture the entire even on camera, was a miracle. It  allows the world to see that day from inside the towers, to actually live in those terrifying moments with the men that risked their lives to save others, and to see the tragedy with our own eyes. It became more personal than ever. I saw these young men running in to save my fellow Americans. I have friends whose parents were supposed to be on those planes. I heard bodies smashing to the concrete as they jumped from the burning building eighty stories up. I watched the stunned and frightened faces of our heroes as they stood in the lobby of the World Trade Center. This day is no longer stories that I hear from my parents or articles I read in the newspaper. It is a real, live, massacre that I can still see vividly in my mind, the footage of the collapsing building playing on repeat in front of my eyes.

With the severity and size of the attack, it is easy to let this day feel like a loss of thousands of lives, but after reading the article At Pentagon, No Words Will Fill Void from the New York Times, it seemed to finally dawn on me that it was the loss of a loved one, for millions of people. It seemed to be one enormous tragedy to me, because I did not know anyone who died in those towers on September 11th, but for millions of people it went beyond seeing there nation lose innocent civilians, but it was seeing their family lose a chair at the dinner table. It wasn't an event they were reminded of when they went to the airport and had to arrive two hours early for security, but it was a void that would never again be filled in their lives. It was a gaping hole in their hearts. It was the loss of someone's father, someone's mother, someone's brother or sister, someone's aunt and uncle and cousin, someone's grandma or grandpa, someone's best friend, someone's high school sweetheart and pregnant wife, someone's newlywed husband, someone's son, someone's daughter, someone's life long companion, someone's entire world. It was an attack on their country, but it was the destruction of their families too.

I don' know how to describe my feelings about this day other than to say that it made me lose a great deal of my faith in humanity. I understand that countries will disagree with other countries and try to bring about changes that they feel to be necessary, but I will never be able to bring myself to understand why anyone would see an act of terrorism such as 9/11, to be a solution to any problem. Re-examining this day has forced me to question what could possible drive a human being to commit a mass murder on thousands of innocent people. How could anyone have so much hate in their heart to commit such a crime? How could a human being ever justify these actions. The human race has divided and taken aim against itself, and I wonder how we have fallen so low that we destroy our own.