September 11, 2001-The saddest day.

September 11, 2001-The saddest day.

I woke up late that day, around 12 pm.  I was a sophomore in college at the time and I had either been up all night studying or partying I don’t really remember.  Anyhow, I dragged myself into the living room of my tiny apartment and turned on the tv. I could not make sense of the scene on the television; a plane was crashing into a building over and over.  It was playing on a loop.  I changed the channel and saw the same scene.  It was on every channel.  A plane crashing into a skyscraper.  As I sat listening to the news reporter dumbstruck, I learned that not one but two planes had crashed into the world trade center.  There were also terrible crashes in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon in Washington D.C.  I had missed it all that morning because I had slept in.  I felt so confused about what was going on, as did much of the world I reckon.  I didn’t understand at the moment that this would be one of the biggest moments in history, one of the biggest terrorist acts ever committed against innocent civilians.  I was stupefied and didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation.  Now this may sound silly, but when you are in the moment, moments so terrible and incomprehensible, sometimes you just go numb to it.  Later that day I drove to campus and walked into the liberal arts building.  This was usually a busy, bustling place but it was a dead zone, nobody there.  I had a Spanish test that evening.  I was still planning on taking it, the world must go on right?  I ran into a friend from my class who said she was too upset to take the exam.  We went to our professor and he indicated that he would still be giving the exam.  He said we must go on, “adelante”.  So I went and took the exam and did especially bad on it, however this was nothing new and I can’t really blame it on the days events.  The next day in my English class we abandoned the scheduled lesson and did an exercise on grieving.  My professor told us that what we were feeling was grief. 

 Fast forward to September 11, 2014.  So much has happened since then.  So much joy and so many horrible things.  September 11 changed everything.  It altered our daily lives and many of the things we used to do without much thought.  We no longer travel the same way, immigration policy, the war, etc.  We went to war after the terrorist attack, so many more lives were lost in that effort.  There were more terrorist attacks all over the world.  Alcaida and Osama Bin Laden were hunted and constantly in the news.  Eventually Bin Laden was caught and killed.  Alcaida lost its stronghold.  It seemed we were successfully defeating the terrorists.  But other groups rose up, more terrible than those before them, downright barbarians.  Most recently ISIS or the Islamic State started attacking in Iraq and claimed responsibility for the public beheading of two journalists.  The beheading of these journalists in Syria was as saddening as September 11, 2001.  I personally felt so saddened once again by the terrible and gruesome deaths of two people I had never even met as I did in the days after September 11, 2001.  President Obama announced this week that the U.S. will carry out air strikes against ISIS targets, and I find myself wondering if this will work.  It just seems that the more we combat the terrorists the more horrid their tactics become.  There is no good answer to any of this, it is just a terrible situation that hopefully the world will overcome.