Every generation has its defining moments: World War II, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, Vietnam, the Cold War, and for our generation, only time will tell. However, one event in particular rests with an especially heavy weight on America’s conscience.
Today is a day ubiquitous in our nation. Twenty years ago, on what should have been a typical Tuesday morning, 2,977 innocent lives were taken in the horrific acts of terrorism on 9/11. Nearly every adult can remember where they were when they saw the news that tragic day. However, every student currently in school was born after the attacks. In spite of this, 9/11 has had a profound impact on our lives.
Arivumani:
While I was born three years after 2001, I have felt the impact of the terrible attacks of 9/11 throughout my life. When registering for school in my birth state of Connecticut, my parents were required to provide three out-of-state emergency contacts, a mundane yet heartbreaking result of parents never coming to pick their children up twenty years ago.
Every year since then, September 11th has been a solemn day of remembrance at school: moments of silence after the pledge, lessons about first responders who made the ultimate sacrifice, and speeches from veterans and survivors. It has also been a reminder of the new presence of police officers at my temple’s entrance, and random inspections as I pass through security with my Indian father at the airport.
However, despite this trauma and friction in the following years, our nation has always found a way to unite and persist in an undoubtedly American fashion. As we honor the 2,977 lives taken twenty years ago today, I maintain my faith in our country’s ability to persevere as we have for the past two decades, even in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.
Sara:
Being born in the year 2005, I can never claim to know the immediate effects of 9/11 as well as my classmates or family members may have. I can never fully understand the shock and pain it caused to witness that tragedy, nor can I recall the moment in time where what could have been a tranquil Tuesday morning broke into mourning that will never quite leave this country.
However, twenty years after the horrific event and every year leading up to the anniversary, the residual impacts of 9/11, both educationally and personally, are intimately known to me. I know the second-hand grief of remembering the day in my history classes and I know the compassion that comes after. Yet, being born in the year 2005 to my parents, both Iraqi immigrants, I also know the averted gazes in my classrooms, just as well as I know the walk to the airport security line, reciting a dialogue I’ve prepared for the moment I understood the aftermaths of fear. And I can recall the moment in time where I cried in my history class at the age of 11, knowing the impact it has had on my family alone, near impossible to quantify that grief across millions of families, both akin and different to mine.
Remembrance is an important virtue to understand America’s history and, more specifically, how to grow braver in the face of tragedy. And ultimately, it is a virtue worth the misty-eyed looks during my teacher’s recollection of that day and anxiety gnawing at me for the entire week prior. But as our memories continue to the 20th anniversary of this tragedy, I hope our capacity for unity will persevere as well, so that bravery is not faced with averted gazes, but rather the strength of every student learning it for the first or thousandth time, no matter when and how they were born.
