9/11 piece for Digital American, unedited.

I don't know if they will take it because it's so late:

We were the generation that woke up after 9/11. The fall of the towers ushered us into some strange new reality. We were 11, 12, 13. The ages when consciousness first really creeps in. And it wasn’t just us American kids, either. It was the youth of the western world, who tasted the reality of what could be considered “war” for the first memorable time.

I was 13 and not necessarily wrapped in a world of fantasy, but something akin to it, maybe. The last beams of childhood upon my life, perhaps. My sister had just moved to Washington D.C. for a teaching job, migrating to a school that was only twenty minutes away from the Pentagon, one of the targets of 9/11. My father was flying for business; his flight was delayed and then cancelled after the incident. We lived in Pennsylvania, hours away from the Shanksville site.

“Oh my God,” I said when the teachers finally caved and told us at the end of a long day of classes and ambiguity. I could not fathom what they explained. And I wouldn’t be able to until I got at home, sat in front of my family room TV and felt the wind sucked out of me as every channel replayed the same footage, over and over again.

Death tolls were predicted to be well in the 1000s. How a city or anyone, even a country, could survive such a blatant defilement was beyond me.

My friend Simon is from Australia, a seemingly safe distance from any of the afflicted areas. Not so much, he claims.

“For me it represents the end of the era of ‘90s optimism, Friends feel-good times, Clinton wealth. 9/11 brought in with it a decade of terror, paranoia and recessions,” he stated, showing that the affect the terrorists intended and got (to some degree) knew no boundaries, cultural, geographical or otherwise.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt safe since that day. And when I say “safe” I mean truly safe. I mean the same sort of safety that radiates through my television when I watch an episode of Seinfeld or Newsradio, somehow the echo of a more innocent era. Maybe that is why ‘90s nostalgia is such a big thing for my generation. What did we worry about, back then? What were our ‘Bogeymen?’

My friend Anna hails from the country of Finland, several time zones safely across the Atlantic Ocean. Finland can proudly claim to be one of the safest places on Earth.

“I had just started my first year at high school. Here the schools start in Mid August so I didn't really know people there,” she said of that day, now standing a decade in the past.  “…I was somewhat bored so I randomly switched on the TV. The Finnish broadcasting company shows news here at that time once an hour and I know it was 5 because there was news on. At first I really couldn't understand what happened when there was a WTC tower smoking in the screen and I was just laughing. Then they showed how the other plane crashed the towers and I think I was just thinking that Americans are weird. I think it was some sort of a defense mechanism.”

Anna’s last thought is perhaps the most poignant:  “I find it rather funny that I remember such details about school the next day. I remember where I got those papers, I think I know at what time and who I read them with. When I think of WTC, I remember the next day and not the 11th day before I heard about the attacks.”

September 12^th was the first day of a new reality for the majority of us. Even if we seem to be slipping from that initial shock, we’re still living in the shell of that aftermath.

I remember not being able to type the word “it” without thinking it resembled the Twin Towers. I remember stopping every time I heard a plane. Sometimes, if a nearby plane sounds too close, I still jolt a little.

Huy Dang hails from our neighbor to the north: not as distant as the others I have mentioned. His memories of the day are all too eerie.

“I was 12 years old and living in Calgary, Alberta and had just finished reading a book about the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center,” Dang recalled. “The day I completed the book was actually September 10, 2001, just one day before the worst attacks that would change the world forever. After reading the book, my only thought for the remainder of that day was “Could something like that ever happen again?!”

The next day, as Huy Dang recollects, “I woke up and decided to turn on the TV. I decided to watch the news, and the first news network that came up was CBC News. Upon reaching that channel, I saw an image of the North Tower burning on the television screen and wondered, “Is that the same building? It can’t be!”

In conclusion, Dang says that “although the terrorism affected many, it did affect me psychologically for a while. I was afraid to leave my house at times. I was afraid to go to school, and I was afraid of being alone as well – and I became very paranoid.” The paranoia, apparently, stayed with him for some time afterwards, as it did a lot of us.

I can’t imagine that the children, coming of age today, will have similar epiphanies.  Instead, for them, such paranoia is commonplace. It’s the norm now, for them, it’s all they know. We might not be as careless as we were in the 1990s, and things may have been somewhat dormant for a while, but the ways we think and live will never be the same as they were, on September 10, 2011.

We can’t go back to sleep.