A lot of people speculated that because we were kids, we didn’t understand the full gravity of what September 11 meant. They were wrong.
The fat-bodied Boeings that Al-Qaeda terrorists used on that September Tuesday burst gaping holes through the rightful naiveté that we lived in; they took something from us, some intangible right to a happy childhood that every kid should possess.
September 11 was the first time that I ever saw my parents truly scared. I had never seen it, and I didn’t how to deal with that, how to accept that, what to do with that. It was deep down, in an incomprehensible way, alarming, and it affected me.
The fear came second for me. My first reaction when the details of the situation were clear was anger; unbelievable, yet-to-be-felt, hot anger rose up in my heart as my country – the United States of America, my home, the red, white, and blue, the untouchably powerful– looked like a far-off country across the globe where in-fighting and wars were common. My country, for the first time in my life, was bleeding.
I knew before I went home from school that day that my world was gone. The happy place where I had no worries disappeared when steel met steel in downtown Manhattan. I knew that. It wasn’t a heralded thing, and it wasn’t something that even registered right away. But in a simple way, in a distinctly child-like way, I understood and accepted the fact that my world was taken from me and that I and everyone my age had been thrust into something that was not temporary or susceptible to a quick, clean revenge that would set things right.
Osama bin Laden took our childhood away from us, and we hated him for that. Perhaps because his was the face that we saw on our television sets every night, mocking us from afar in our hurt, we absolutely, unequivocally placed that bearded devil in our hearts as the one to blame. It was common for us to sit at lunch and discuss what we would each do if we hypothetically found Osama bin Laden; the answers are not fit for print.
He became the equivalent of Lex Luthor, the Joker, or Magneto to us, and we even criminalized him so much in our minds that he almost felt fictional, just a name “Osama bin Laden”: a dark-skinned, bearded man in a turban. His death vindicated the 11-year-old, frightened little boy inside of me. It was personal.
It’s hard – and it feels selfish – to express the hurt that a child felt on that day. Everyone hurt. But I, and I can’t speak for all, felt especially bruised by the events of 9/11. I still do. I’m angry still, ten years later. I can still see out of 11-year-old eyes the chronological chain unfolding before me. Maybe more acutely even than some adults, my classmates and I knew that this attack – a hard word to swallow, then and now – would shape the entirety of our adult lives. We grew up on that day. We had to. We’re the 9/11 generation.
