I was in third grade when the towers went down. I remember little about that year, but I remember Sept. 11. It was one of the only nights where my family watched
TV during dinner.
I found out about what happened when two kids were arguing on the school playground. One of them said two buildings were blown up. I did not believe them. Unfortunately, I soon found out that it was all incredibly real.
My mom and I went to New York four years later. I only remembered the towers from movies, and I had never seen the skyline before.
I thought that because it was a couple of years after the bombings it would not be a big deal anymore. The moment I rode in a town car from LaGuardia airport to downtown Manhattan, I knew that New York and the world would never be the same.
When my mom and I visited Ground Zero, it was shocking to see the two holes where the twin towers stood. The holes were about the space of a city block. I later found out that the dirt excavated for the foundations of the towers was used to create the Battery Park neighborhood.
People wrote messages to their missing loved ones who worked in the towers and laced the fence surrounding ground zero with flowers.
We later took a ferry around the island and saw the two gaping holes in the skyline.
I never realized the sheer magnitude of the incident. The towers were a symbol of New York. People went to work there and to this day not all of the victims have been identified. This event touched all religions, ethnicities and economic groups of the country and, as a result, the world.
It is frustrating when people deal with their grief by blaming large groups of people for what happened 11 years ago.
Muslims did not attack New York. Iraq and Afghanistan did not attack New York.
Terrorists hijacked planes and set worldwide panic. Historically, it is easier to blame and turn a group of people into society’s whipping boy than to show cultural sensitivity and forgiveness. The losses felt were heart breaking but no act of revenge will replace that day in history.
It is not often that the majority of the people in our country can unite.
Politics and religion spark strong polarizing debates, but with the tragedy that occurred eleven years ago American became united in grief and later in healing. Sept. 11 was the unspeakable tragedy of our generation, let us learn from it and move towards acceptance and forgiveness.
