9/11

Twenty years ago today, on the 11th September 2001, four US passenger jets were seized by suicide attackers. Two were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, another crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Just under three thousand people were killed.

I have no direct connection to the event but in a way it still changed my life. 

I was nine at the time and had had an ordinary, forgettable day at school. It was the lollipop man that safely guided us across the road twice a day that asked my Dad if he had seen what had happened. Whilst the internet very much existed, this was before the time when you were constantly connected to the world and no-one I knew had a smartphone. My Dad had been working and hadn't switched on the TV, which was the main source of news in those days. 

We arrived home and someone switched on the TV. We'd always watched children's TV for a while before dinner time. This was a few months before the CBBC channel launched in the UK and back then kids TV took a few hours of the schedule on the main channels. Occasionally kids TV would be bumped for a sporting event or a breaking news special and that day was one of the latter. Initially I was just annoyed that my programmes weren't on and soon discovered that they had been moved to BBC Two. But then in an unprecedented move I was told that we would not be changing the channel.

I was not best pleased about this but then I saw what the breaking news was shown. There was an aeroplane flying into a skyscraper. I asked my Dad how a plane had crashed into a building. The horrific truth was relayed to me: it had been flown into it on purpose. 

I can remember that moment of cognitive dissonance really strongly twenty years later. At nine I was vaguely aware that people did bad things but living in a small, rural town I couldn't actually name an example of any real-life crime I'd heard of. Presumably bad things still happened but I certainly wasn't aware of them. I knew about the concept of murder but this was a whole other level. 

My brother was too young to have any understanding of what was happening but I was just at the point where I could understand but it opened up my world. My Dad patiently told me what the word "terrorist" that they kept talking about meant and as I gradually processed all this information I felt a portion of my childhood innocence seep away. It dawned on me that this is what the world is really like, that there were people whose morality I couldn't have even comprehended an hour before. 

For a short while there was a fear that this was the new normal, with the news continuing to report on what had happened over the coming days and weeks and there being regular reports about suspected terrorist attacks that turned out to be nothing. It felt like at any moment a plane could come crashing into whatever building I was in and that would be it. It took sometime to comprehend that terrorists had little reason to attack a small Hampshire town.

I was much more aware of world events after 9/11. I don't think I'd really had much of a concept of anything that had happened in the world before that but I definitely was after that day. I heard George Bush and Tony Blair talk about the War on Terror and saw how the US invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban government. 

Over the years I saw reports of different terrorist attacks across the world, most memorably 7/7 in London. As I got older though I began to see a different side to the news reports on these events. For a long time I'd focused on the evil that perpetrated them but my focus shifted and I saw the people coming to the rescue afterwards. I heard someone say that whenever anything bad happens, look for the people that come to help because they are always there. A small handful of people do something terrible but far larger numbers of people come to help. That's what humanity is truly like. Sure, there are horrible people out there who do terrible things but actually they are a tiny minority and the majority are kind and wonderful. 

Today I am thinking about the 2,977 people whose lives were cut off far too early and also of the many heroes who put their own lives on the line to save others after this attack and the many others that have followed in the year's since. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventure of the Great Reset

Image
In which I reflect and regroup... I am not going to lie, 2024 has been tough so far. You begin a year with such high hopes and sometimes the year decides to take those high hopes and crush them in the most brutal way.  I'm currently enjoying the tranquility of the summer holidays and a rest that has perhaps never felt quite so well-earned. Perhaps the best piece of advice I was given during the many training sessions I have had over the last few years is to make the most of the resets in your life. That might be small resets, as small as a few seconds in the middle of the day or they might be bigger resets like six weeks off work.  Part of this reset has been getting outside. The year so far has not been helped by the endless miserable weather. We always like to joke in the UK that it rains a lot but this year has taken that to the next level. We often think of climate change as meaning we will get hotter weather but it just means that the weather will change and will get more...
Read more

Best Picture 2024

Image
The 2024 Oscars ceremony is mere hours away and I've finally finished writing my annual post about this year's Best Picture nominees. This is my sixth year doing this and once again I've seen all the nominees. Let's take a look! American Fiction Thelonius 'Monk' Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright who is perhaps best known as Felix Leiter in the Daniel Craig Bond films, is an intelligent African-American professor and writer whose high-brow books sell poorly. Frustrated, he writes a satire of "black" books which is unexpectedly taken by the publishing world to be a serious piece of literature. It's a hilarious film with Wright having lots of fun taking on Monk's alter-ego. At the same time though it's also a clever critique of the sort of media that is consumed by white people to make them feel better about racial issues and the film points out that black people can have normal lives beyond ghettos and gangs- the film itself also tells an ord...
Read more

1000 Miles

Image
Famous Scottish duo The Proclaimers once sang the words "I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door". These lyrics are now part of my plan for 2019. Well, the falling down bit isn't part of the plan but with dyspraxia the likelihood of falling down at someone's door during the next twelve months is not out of the question. I have never tended to set traditional resolutions but I do love a challenge. # walk1000miles is a big challenge run by Country Walking  magazine. The rules are fairly flexible but the idea is simply to walk 1000 miles in a calendar year. 1000 miles is about the distance between the UK and Poland. Now I actually do a fair amount of walking and have hit my 10,000 daily step target every day for nearly three years now. Walking a total of 1000 miles would probably not be a huge challenge if I counted every bit of walking I did, including the many miles of chasing chi...
Read more