The thing I remember most about 9/11 is how ignorant I was of all the events that happened that morning when they happened. When the planes actually hit, I was asleep in bed and I didn't really have a care in the world except that I wanted to play N64 cause I got Mario Party 3 for my birthday the day before...
My mom comes in, and wakes me up telling me "terrorists attacked the World Trade Center." I thought she said "tourists" and I had no idea what she meant, but I didn't overly care and I went back to bed because it was a day off and I didn't feel like spending the morning being awake. It wasn't until I got up several hours later that I got my first look of what happened that day; it was the smoking rubble of the North Tower with a caption that said "WTC Destroyed; thousands dead."
I didn't understand at the time what it actually meant for the world, but then again I don't know if anyone did. I didn't see the planes hitting the buildings until years later and I have always been bewildered at the pure malice, hatred and ignorance it took for a group of men to hijack these planes and fly them into the towers.
Like a lot of people around the world, in the weeks that followed I was upset; 9/11 was the first time I had ever seen the way of life that I was so accustomed to threatened by another. Unfortunately I participated in the wave of racism against Muslims - and really anyone that looked Muslim - until I realized that responding to harted with hatred wasn't the answer. The people who crashed the planes into the towers are not the same people as the majority of the men and women around the world who follow Islam, and if there is one positive that I can take from 9/11 it is that despite the culture of hatred and racism that dominated the West in the weeks after I managed to learn that.
I hope that something like that never happens again. And I lose a lot of faith in this world when I know that it will. Maybe it won't be Radical Islamists, maybe it won't involve America, but eventually this will happen again and that depresses me to no end.
