I remember hearing the words vividly, sitting in the cafeteria of my Chappaqua, NY, middle school: “Planes have crashed into the World Trade Center. We don’t know much else right now, but we believe it to be the work of terrorists.”
“Terrorist.” I looked around hoping to see some sort of recognition in my peers’ eyes. I had never heard the word before. It sounded foreign, alien—as unnatural as what was happening on the television in front of me.
Whispers rippled through the cafeteria. Everyone’s mom and dad worked in Manhattan. Where exactly was the World Trade Center in relation to our parents’ offices? Should we be worried? What was happening?
As time went on, hysterics escalated. When we returned to our classroom, one kid broke down in nervous, hiccupping tears. His mother worked on one of the top floors of one of the towers. We didn’t know what to say. We were kids. We tried to grasp the situation and assure ourselves everything would be okay. I remember feeling helpless and having no idea how to feel, what to think, or what to expect.
Even going home didn’t alleviate my anxiety. My mom hugged me when I got off the bus and we sat and watched TV together for the rest of the afternoon—the now iconic and still horrifying image of smoke pluming from the deteriorating towers. Who were these people? Why would they do something so horrifying? What was this even about? Was this war?
Back at school the next day, we were forced to talk about what happened. Everyone knew someone affected, and the administration and teachers wanted to help us with any insecurities and fears we were harboring.
In weeks following, there was a lot of rhetoric bouncing around about terrorism. At 11, the concept seemed illogical and deranged—something I just couldn’t understand and never would. In Social Studies, we abandoned our original curriculum for the rest of September and spent several weeks learning about the Middle East—its geography, culture, and religion. My teacher told us that it would be essential for us to understand certain things in order to fully grasp the inevitable global situation. So it went for a couple weeks—I could place and name every country in the Middle East and knew the basic tenants of Islam. I went from knowing absolutely nothing to focusing intently. I was forced to look beyond my previous conception of the world.
The decade preceding 9/11 was a charmed era of economic prosperity, relative global stability and, for me, a sheltered childhood. I was born the week before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The concepts of war and terror did not figure into my ignorant childhood. They were far away and didn’t concern me. They didn’t concern a lot of people.
Do American 11-year-olds now grow up understanding the meaning of the word “terrorism?” They must. Their lives have been spent in long security lines at the airport, with news reports of bomb threats and a lingering overcast assumption that we live in shadow of “terror.” They have probably heard the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” so often while growing up that they seem like regular, commonplace features of the world. Back then, “terror” was a new enemy for us to hate. Today, it seems just like any other word in an adolescent’s vocabulary.
Last week, when I noticed clusters of people that had evacuated buildings around campus, I just assumed it to be a fire alarm or a bomb threat, as if they were interchangeable. It has been 10 years since the 9/11 attacks, and though our world has changed dramatically in good ways and bad, we have all become more pessimistic and paranoid. Previous generations would belittle our concerns—they survived the Red Scare and Cold War paranoia, or even further back to the World Wars. But to a generation, our generation, that grew up in age of innocence, 9/11 was a pivotal moment when things grew to proportions that we could no longer control.
Terrorism is no longer a foreign word for an 11 year old or a 21 year old. It is something that pervades our everyday consciousness. Even though I’ve taken several classes in college dealing with the subject, I am a little embarrassed to admit that I still don’t really get it beyond a superficial understanding. Deep down, I still think about all those questions I asked myself 10 years ago, though maybe in a less basic way.
