On September 11th: the Past Ten Years

As a parent of a nine-year-old, I suppose it wouldn't ordinarily occur to you to teach your child that there is such a thing as evil. As a nine-year-old, it certainly never occurs to you to ask. Ordinarily, I guess, it happens later by necessity; a child so young is not equipped to deal with something as dark or serious as evil or hatred on anything more than an abstract level, no matter how intelligent he or she is. When the most odious thing in one's world is broccoli or fractions, true evil is near impossible to comprehend. Nine-year-olds are full of faith and trust in the world, and there is no reason it should not be so, because for most of them, mom and dad can protect them from harm, and the most danger anything poses is running with scissors or the playground bully. Ten years ago, I was one such nine-year-old, and like every other day, the morning of September 11th dawned beautiful and bright, like the late summer does in New England. Ten years later, it is still the most beautiful day I will never forget.

Much like having no real concept of evil or hate, my peers and I had no real concept of tragedy, either. It was a word we knew, and it described something abstract, something sad, something that happened to other people who you prayed for or sent sympathy cards to. Tragedy was not a personal thing, and we didn't know how it felt. We couldn't write a paper on it, and we couldn't act it out. Tragedy didn't touch us in the secure bubble of loving homes and friendly grade schools, and we weren't seeking it out. No matter, because that morning, it sought us.

It is a cruel thing to expose a child to evil, to hate him, or to cause him to know the pain of tragedy. I think I will always believe that. We have not equipped children to handle the immensity of those things, and we shouldn't do so until they are ready and able to process them. They're concepts children will know about, but not ones they should be exposed to. These are the things that shatter innocence, destroy security, and instill fear, and on September 11th my friends and I were exposed to all of them. On that day, we lost a part of our childhoods we would never be able to reclaim. This is not to say that in one day we became world-weary and jaded, because we didn't. But for most of us, it was the first time we learned that mom and dad couldn't protect us from everything, and that evil was very real and knew no boundaries.

I thank God now that I couldn't take in everything that had happened right away. I saw the news, I heard the stories, but something about it didn't really click for a while. However, it was hard enough in the meantime to try to understand why someone would do this. How could somebody hate innocent people so much that they would intentionally kill thousands of them? Wasn't killing people wrong? Wasn't God going to do something about this? It was difficult to process what was going on, but I guess it's taken these ten years to find out exactly what happened. As much as it's been a process of discovery about facts or events, it's been a self-discovery, as well. It has taken me ten years to figure out what happened and the effects of the 9.11 attack because, I guess, in some ways I would have to grow up in the post-9.11 world, and certain bits of knowledge and wisdom were only going to come with time.

Because I couldn't fully grasp or process what had happened to America, or to me personally, my process of discovery began when I started to hear that Muslim kids were being singled out at their schools and bullied because they were also "terrorists" like the hijackers. At that age, it's still a pretty effective tool to get a child to think about how they would feel in a similar situation, and I knew that I would feel just as sad and angry as those other kids did. I knew that all Muslims couldn't possibly be hijackers, even if only for the simple reasons that there weren't that many planes or that many tall buildings to knock down. My parents would also tell me that 9.11 wasn't motivated by another faith, it was motivated by angry people who were poor and had been told that attacking America was a good thing. At the time, I didn't really understand the motivations, but I did understand that if you were an American, you weren't happy about these attacks, hence, the Muslim boys and girls didn't deserve the treatment they were getting.

Through middle school and high school, I began to learn more about Islam and politics, following America's military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. I started to understand some of the more obvious things that would have motivated the hijackers, the things that I wouldn't have been able to understand in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. It was at this point in high school that my atheism and my relativism clashed; the atheist in me said religion was responsible for this ignorance, destruction and sorrow, but the relativist told me I couldn't judge people's actions or their motivations for doing so. It became a quandary that I put out of my mind because I wasn't able to riddle out which stance was right, though I now know that neither was.

As I moved into more of a comparative religious study phase, I began to see that, like the Bible, the Qur'an had passages in it that were gruesome and violent. I began to see that these men had been told that these were the important parts of the Qur'an, and that the whole part about Allah forbidding murder and the like were being ignored, much in the same way that many Christians ignore the Just War Theory. I began to feel angry that Muslims had been given such a bad reputation over the years because there were fringe whackos who identified with a couple of extreme passages calling themselves Muslim and crusading against the West for Allah. I was an atheist, though, and only studying these things for class, because everybody knew that religion was silly, and all religious people were being duped to some degree or another.

Last year, when September 11 rolled around, I was on the Newman Center's freshman retreat, and at Mass that morning, we all just reminisced about how we couldn't believe it had been almost ten years. We prayed for the families of the victims, and for peace and protection for our country, but by the time night fell, I was already wrapped up in bigger things, like being completely overwhelmed by an experience of God and conversion of heart. I gave no thought to September 11 until May, when Osama bin Laden was killed.

That night, I think I finally came to the fullest realization I've yet had about what happened on September 11. Some people I knew were out in the streets celebrating because a threat to America had been eliminated, some were screaming because they thought that Osama had finally gotten what he deserved, some were probably just caught up in the moment. I was none of those things. I wasn't even outside. I was inside with a couple of friends, waiting to see what would happen next, trying to absorb what this meant for us and for our country. I realized for the first time that what had happened on September 11 was just plain sad. An angry, disenfranchised man with a lot of money was organizing a lot of other angry, disenfranchised men to attack another country because they had money, power and freedom. They saw their nations as having been bullied by this country, and decided to strike back, believing it was the will of Allah. They killed people for no gain of their own, and achieved nothing more than to make the entire world angry, and to make the most powerful country in the world seek out others like them to kill. Osama bin Laden was an angry little man who had started a horrific killing spree which continues to this day.

It was then I decided to pray for him. I really didn't know what else to do. I wasn't happy he was dead, but I was shocked. I knew this wouldn't put an end to what was happening in the Middle East, but it meant a lot of big changes in the lives of myself and my peers. I did the only thing I could think of to do, and so I stopped to pray for him. I had no idea what to say, so I prayed only that God's will be done, and that Americans would remember that the fights we had started weren't near over yet. I was alternately praised and scorned by people who either thought praying for him was noble, or that praying for him was an un-American act of treachery because he was finally burning in hell where he belonged.

For the past ten years, my peers and I have had to deal with the reality of living in a post-9.11 world. We had to learn about things that were way beyond our ken before we should have done, and in an awful way. In some ways, I wish we could have continued with our childhoods unspoiled until it was time for us to learn about evil, until we were able to process it. It didn't turn out that way, though, and I've learned a lot over the years about myself, about people around me, about the whole world because of September 11. I wonder now what the next ten years will look like, how the world will remember this date which will live in infamy. All I can say for sure is that I will always remember September 11, 2001, and that its sheer sadness is a cruel reminder of our broken nature which makes me desire all the more to help heal this world before I (hopefully) go back to God.