The Day After Tomorrow... Ten Years Later

Today is the first full day of the NFL season, and I was considering boycotting it. Why you ask? Well because today is significant for a different reason. And there is only so much flag waving and American circle jerking I can take. I did watch, and it was surprisingly little and tasteful the coverage that I saw.

This may seem very insensitive. Maybe it is. I'm not trying to downplay how big a tragedy it was. And it was horrific. But there have been much bigger tragedies in the world since then, and we have people overseas who die each day in battle, soldiers and citizens. We don't give them half as much coverage, and their tragedy is no less significant.

I need to drop the obligatory "where were you" moment. I was in bed. I usually had Tuesdays off from school and I slept in. My mom called me and asked if I was watching TV. I told her I was in bed. She told me to turn on the TV right away. About 30 seconds after I turned on the TV, the second plane hit the second building. I remember being astonished and scared. I had practice that evening and thought it might be cancelled. I don't know why they would, but I also thought there would be chaos in the streets. No chaos, and practice was held. But I remember it was overcast, and from the field it looked like the CN Tower had fallen as well. Some of the players joked about it. It was very eerie.

What I wrote above might seem even more insensitive when I say that I actually knew someone who died that day. Not someone close, but she was a Internet friend that I used to talk to on and off. It wasn't till a few years later that I was browsing BlackPlanet and I noticed someone had a banner up commemorating her death. I was shocked, it had been a while since I had thought about it at that point. And up until then it had been a distant tragedy, now it was one that directly affected me. It still kinda freaks me out when I think about it to this day.

The world changed that day. The US changed the way they treated the world, and as a result the world changed the way they treated each other. If someone pre-2001 came into the future and went through the airport, their mind would be blown. The US shifted to the left, and Canada shifted to the right. When I really sit down and think about what has been happening in the past 10 years, and even the past 3 years, its really scary.

A tragedy occurred, a wrong was done. the by-line since then has been "never forget". And certainly the world has not forgotten. But what have we done about it? What was the response? How have we coped with it? What are we doing to make sure it never happens again?

I think below all of it there is the question we have to face first: Is what we have done so far the right thing?

-J