I remember finding out as I started my shift at the residence halls front desk where I worked. I remember my best friend coming in, and hugging him. I remember being scared for my grandparents, who live in Manhattan, enough so that I rang my mother, something I would otherwise never do. I remember CNN.com was completely frozen on a photograph of a smoking tower and still not being totally sure what that meant.
I remember in the days to come how pissed off I was at my father for insisting that if I didn’t hang an American flag on my dorm room door, I wasn’t a proper American or a patriot, and thinking that he was missing the fucking point, but doing it anyway.
I remember thinking that this was the sort of horrible destruction that was brought upon the UK and European countries every day for years during the world wars and that maybe we were just a little bit lucky that this was the only attack on our mainland (excluding the Japanese balloon), but of course I didn’t say that.
2669 Americans died. Excluding 19 terrorists, 372 foreign nationals also died, from 56 countries. It was the largest terrorist attack ever on the British, who lost 67 people (52 died in 7/7).
These attacks were, of course, terrible. But this small cell of radical fundamentalist crazies (and others like them) has bred so much hate and fear. I once had a boyfriend, whom I cared for deeply, who was Muslim and whose family was from Pakistan. The only comments from my father were warnings about woman beatings and cracks about terrorism. He’d never even met him.
9/11 put back progress in a great many areas in America. For a while dissent against the government made you un-American, whereas I believe questioning the government is one of the most patriotic things anyone can do. That stigma has lessened over time, but a distrust of anyone in a turban or a hijab still remains. People are mostly the same all over the world. Some are dickheads and some are lovely. Most are just trying to live their lives as best they can, often struggling against their raising, the expectations of their family, poverty and in some cases, religions that have been slow to modernise.
If it sounds like I’m just talking about people in places like Afghanistan, actually I could just as easily be talking about myself. I was raised Mormon, probably the most conservative and possibly the most terrifying (excluding, in my mind, Scientology) religion in America. I was also raised brutally Republican, with no room in our household for anything that wasn’t broadcast on Fox news. Clinton should have been jailed, Nixon got screwed, etc etc etc.
From this raising, I went off to college. And I struggled, with meeting gay friends (“faggots”), people from the Middle East (“ragheads”) and *gasp*, worst of all, DEMOCRATS. I never, ever used the words in the brackets, I’d like to make that clear. But they were commonly used in my house. I was taught that you spot a gay person by the earring and that “right [ear] was wrong”. I still unfortunately hear that in my head sometimes when I meet someone I think might be gay, even though of course I know it’s bullshit.
At first, in my first year and into my second year at university, I lightly defended Bush, especially after 9/11. It was all I knew, it was all I had been taught, it was the only world I’d been shown. And it took time for me to find my own way. In the meantime, I was challenged to debates I didn’t know how to respond to, because I’d only been exposed to rhetoric, not facts or figures. I was ridiculed by people with progressive, liberal parents, people who had been allowed to watch the proper news. I can’t blame them really, but I felt persecuted, perhaps in the same way that anyone does when they come from a hyper-religious conservative household, where that is all they have known for their entire life.
Perhaps this is partly why I can’t help but have sympathy for young fundamentalists, who have had nothing but hate taught to them in the same way that I did. I left my house when I was 17 and in essence divorced my father. I finished high school and went to college on scholarship. But that was hard, and probably unusual. My father and I don’t speak now. I can’t expect that sort of sacrifice of every young person that feels they might want to go another way. The bonds of family are strong.
It’s something to think about, when you see a young man on a video shouting about jihad. Almost everyone is a product of their circumstances. It takes strong people, at the right time, to affect any sort of change. And it’s happening, slowly. The Arab spring is proving that. For every radical in a country, there are hundreds of people leading quiet, honest lives. Imagine going abroad and being lumped in with, say, the People’s Temple at Jonestown, just because you are American or white or called Jim.
I remember 9/11. We all do. But it’s never been an excuse for forgetting that we’re all human.