In my grandparents time, Pearl Harbor was one of the most defining moments of a generation. I don't think for my (or even my parents) generation, any event was so Earth shaking as those moments when highjacked planes flew themselves into the former World Trade Center in New York. The images from that day will haunt me for the rest of my life I suspect. The world will be living with the aftershocks for a generation to come.
Make no mistake, twenty years later we are living in the shadow of the Twin Towers collapsing. The world as we know it changed immediately after that event, and it took on a momentum of its own.
Perhaps because it is the 20th anniversary of that terrible day, or perhaps because of the chaos we have seen playing out in Afghanistan recent, but because of it all, I am brought back to when I wasn't yet ten years old and I saw the world change. I remember the news conferences, the repeated footage, and the tumultuous decisions around the clock as the news tried to keep up with the response to the deadliest terrorist attack in human history which killed nearly 3,000 and wounded 25,000. I even remember the fear that crept into everyone in some form or another.
Barely a month would pass before the Bush administration ordered military action in Afghanistan, and until recently, we were living with a "forever war" where US and allied forces were fighting an uphill battle against a tenacious enemy who had harbored the man who carried out 9/11. Little would the world realize that the war would go on for nearly two decades, and the most powerful military in the world would lose. Whether it was because there was no coherent mission, enriching weapons manufacturers, it was a war that went on well past the point of sanity and only succeeded, broadly, in carrying out its goal of impoverishing Al-Qaeda, and killing Osama bin Laden. In Pakistan.
That of course, was not all. Seemingly losing track of the mission at hand the Bush administration then contrived to invade Iraq and topple the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein, a man who had nothing to do with 9/11. This would lead to another "forever war" which did toppled Saddam, but did very little for the stability of the Middle East as a whole. All the consequences of that decision are still playing out to this day.
I have been reading all about that history recently. The bungling, the fear, the botched reactions, and it is sobering. I can only encourage people who lived through it, and those born afterwards, to go out and read the more accessible history detailing the choices made going to war, and after the wars had ostensibly "ended" according to the politicians. It's a mess that, twenty years on, is still difficult to understand.
History aside, I am choosing to spend this 9/11 living for tomorrow. We must remember the dead from that day, but we cannot forget the innumerable graves dug across the Middle East by decades of war and pointless struggle. We should open our arms to those fleeing the consequences of the actions of the West in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we should do better on the world stage in the coming decades.
So today, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I ask everyone to take a moment of silence, not just for those lost in New York, but for every life lost in the last two decades. Remember these tragedies, and remember that we can do better in the world. There are so many people who have grown up not knowing the collapse of the Two Towers and its traumatic images, and they don't need to live in the shadow of the mistakes of the past. We can build a better world for tomorrow, and we should set our energies to doing so.
