Sept. 11: Talking about our generation

Every American life was shaken by the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. War, danger and fear seemed closer than they had ever been since Pearl Harbor. For young children living in the northeast, it was traumatizing. When the 9/11 attacks happened, most of us were around nine years old, an age where it seemed nothing could hurt us.

Our innocence was robbed that day. Many of us remember the Twin Towers from the time we were very little, spotting them from far away on trips into New York City with our families. When we got off the school bus on Sept. 11, 2001, we saw crowds of distressed parents running to their children, screaming “the Twin Towers fell!”

How could such big buildings fall? Then we saw the news station airing the footage of what looked like a huge explosion in the middle of the city and we watched people running around, panicking.

We will never forget that day. Not everyone in the country feels intimately connected to 9/11, but for those who lived in the northeast, it was a dark day that will never leave our minds.

So many family members died, so many were injured. And there were such miraculous stories of those who just missed the train that would have taken them to World Trade Center as the planes hit.

It seems that when most people think of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is with a sense of disgust, because they feel that we should never have gone there.

Yes we all want the soldiers to come home. But if we think about the Twin Towers and why we went to war in the first place, we can see that tragedy brought us together as a nation.

That feeling didn’t last long, and it certainly doesn’t exist today. But on this anniversary it is important to remember that for a time we all believed in the same thing.