Fear and Loathing In the US: Remembering 9-11-01.
Yeats once said that personality is born out of pain. This concept is true when considering the identity of a generation because it is in the painful experiences that we are united, and a generation is given a true identity. My grandmother and her generation enlisted after Pearl Harbor was attacked, my mother's generation mourned the assassination of JFK, and we, well we have 9-11.
On the morning of Tuesday September, 11 I was in my debate classroom (100) when the librarian, Mr. Blair, came into the room and quietly spoke to Mrs. Roth, our coach. He then stood up and announced to the class that a terrorist group had crashed into the world trade center building, and he thought we might like to know before the principal announced it to the entire school. We needed to know too, because the debate topic for that year was weapons of mass destruction, and this was the week before the first tournament. We needed to prepare to defend against cases which dealt with terrorism, and claimed that it was a weapon of mass destruction. I was allowed to go down to the library to watch the news coverage as it happened. As I arrived the conference room was just filling up with secretaries, teachers, and other school personnel. They kept re-playing the image of the first tower being violated, and my first thought was, selfishly enough, "this could've been worse, there could've been much more damage. As is, only a couple of floors of the building are going to be affected. That means that we probably won't have to deal with this case this weekend." The principal came over the intercom to announce what had occurred to the entire student body, but i only caught the first couple of words, "The world has experienced a great loss today." because i was distracted by the sight of another plane crashing into the second tower. I got the chills. "Oh my God!" someone to my left muttered.
