Friday 11 September 2009

A Day That Rocked The World

September 11, 2001 I was just across the river from NYC, in northern New Jersey, asleep in my dorm. The phone rang, and someone said (funny, can't remember who called me) to turn the TV on. After several moments of fogginess that addles the brain in waking moment, I realised what I was being told. I didn't have a TV in my dorm, so I went to the library, and there we all watched the twin towers. A lot of people on my campus knew people who were in the twin towers. Being just across the river, it was too close to home. I knew about wars being fought somewhere in the distance, seen the pictures and news, but this was different. This was happening less than hundred miles away. It was personal. I remember walking around in the lower part of the twin towers, browsing in shops. I was young enough to feel the horror at the shattering of confident youth attitude that "this could never happen to us." Since then there have been far too many terror attacks that have been "personal" but September 11 for me, and I believe for many other people, remains the one that perhaps changed the way we look at the world.

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