The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy has reached us. The question of how it has affected my life or changed my views has been posed to me. Let me consider the questions.
First, of all, as I look back and recall where I was when it happened, I realize that my family lived in a different house. We lived in a small Minnesota community – eighteen hundred people, living in a mile square area, town surrounded by rolling farmland.
Eighteen hundred people, who all came from varying backgrounds, small enough to practically know everybody! Everyone related to someone. To me, it seems like a small number of unrelated people. When I compare the number of people to the high school that I attended in Mankato, the number of people in my ‘class’ numbered 319, so to be from a community of eighteen hundred seems very intimate.
Intimate enough to be close friends with whom you are close friends with, and not close friends with those that you have not encouraged the relationships with. So. When I consider the idea of how the Twin Towers falling in New York City affected me, I find that it didn’t.
I am not a big television watcher. The day that it happened, my neighbor was glued to her television set and she was very shocked by the newscast. It was because of her insistence that I turned on my own television to watch the broadcast.
I find it amazing that one building had that many people inside it. I find it amazing that two airplanes were able to make them fall. I find it amazing that there are people in this world that would go out of their way to injure other people.
I find it appalling that the news media would encourage further attention to the perpetrators of the act by glorifying the day and making the families of the victims relive it over and over.
It’s like a bad movie or listening to an old LP that has a scratch in the groove. Remember how when you’d get a record that repeated the same sentence over and over and over you’d finally take matters into your own hands, walk over to the record player and either grab the needle lift and move to a new spot, or that LP would suddenly become a Frisbee outside onto your lawn.
Let’s not continue to dwell on the event that happened.
Let it go.