Fear and Loathing In the US: Remembering 9-11-01

Nobel Prize winner W. B. Yeats once said that personality is born out of pain. This concept is true when considering the identity of a generation because it is in the painful experiences that we are united, and a generation is given a true identity. My grandmother and her generation enlisted after Pearl Harbor was attacked, my mother’s generation mourned the assassination of JFK, and we, well we have 9-11.

On the morning of Tuesday September, 11 I was in my debate classroom (100) when the librarian, Mr. Blair, came into the room and quietly spoke to Mrs. Roth, our coach. He then stood up and announced to the class that a terrorist group had crashed into the world trade center building, and he thought we might like to know before the principal announced it to the entire school. We needed to know too, because the debate topic for that year was weapons of mass destruction, and this was the week before the first tournament. We needed to prepare to defend against cases which dealt with terrorism, and claimed that it was a weapon of mass destruction. I was allowed to go down to the library to watch the news coverage as it happened. As I arrived the conference room was just filling u

I told them of the planes that had gone down at other locations across the US, and of the people who jumped from the highest windows to try to escape, and of the emergency workers who were trapped or dead along with many of the employees who were in the buildings. I told of the great relief effort that would be required, and finally, I told them that a name had been assigned to the people who had caused this tremendous loss. Up to this point my fellow classmates and been given a new definition of fear, of pain, of bravery, of a hero, of loss, and now, they had a new definition of evil. “A terrorist group named Al-Qaida, from Afghanistan has claimed responsibility for the attacks.” Now that there was a name, before there was understanding, before there was a chance of learned commiseration, there was hatred.

My mom called me out of school then, and once I was at her house she began telling me her opinions on the issue. She, like the rest of the people I had interacted with that day was full of hatred, a hatred that like most others was the spawn of ignorance. She said that we should just nuke Afghanistan. I tried again and again to explain to her that this was a select group of individuals who happened to be from Afghanistan, not a group of soldiers who were representing the actions of a government or a people. I told her that a Nuke would kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people, but she just wouldn’t listen. I explained to her that it would be like a foreign country nuking the US becau

Some topics in this essay:
Pearl Harbor, Al-Qaida Afghanistan, Olathe Kansas, Middle East, Nobel Prize, Loathing Remembering, innocent people, principal announced, mass destruction,