Remembering 9/11

I was hesitant to write this post, and I am not afraid to say I pushed it back until the very last minute.

Today is the 11th of September 2021. I do understand life might have caught you in its relentless whirlwind and you might not have realised the significance of this date.

Surely by now you must have come across a piece of news or seen it somewhere.

On the off-chance you have realised it has been 20 years since one of the most fundamental moments of recent history from me, then I apologise. It is not pleasant.

I would also like to preface this post with a warning.

This is a purely subjective exploration of an irrefutably abominable act, regardless of the factors that precipitated its occurrence.

There will not be any political commentary or conspiratorial platitudes about its perpetration and the terrible consequences that ensued. I am only going to talk about how integral it is for me.

In any case, that hesitation draws from my clear non-Americanness. I was born in a very small town, (population 6500 and some change) in 1997, in a small island of the Canarian archipelago, 5335 kilometres (3315 miles for my imperially impaired readers) away from New York.

So I had this debate with myself. Who am I really to talk about it?

Then realisation dawned on me. There is a very strong case for everyone on Earth to talk about it, given those consequences I was not going to get into.

The reason for my strange obsession with 9/11 is because it is my first memory. The very first one.

At the time I was 4 years old. I vividly remember I was in the living room of my old family home, watching Shrek of all things.

Yep, you read that right. Shrek. Interestingly, the film came out on the 29th of June 2001, only several months before the tragedy.

So there I was, placidly watching the VCR my dad had bought for me when my parents burst in and fumbled with the remote.

I knew with the oddly accurate emotion-reading child-radar that something was not quite right. Perhaps it was the strained tone of their voices or the way they completely blindsided me for the screen.

Would you believe me if I told you I even remember what scene the film was paused on?

Shrek and Donkey had made it to the castle to rescue Fiona from the cruel grasp of the Dragon. They got separated and in their hasty escape, Donkey finds himself atop a crumbling pillar, facing the Dragon that turns out to be a Dragoness in the plot twist of the new millenium.

My father then found the pause button, and the change input button, and suddenly I was no longer looking at the miracle of animation that is Shrek.

Two towers that I had only seen in films, and smoke. So much smoke. They billowed thick, black clouds of it.

The images are etched by fire in my head, that much is true. I cannot, however, remember exactly what I thought about it.

Couldn't have been a terribly clever observation about the human experience, I was 4 at the time, remember?

I am sure I didn't think twice about it, such is the mind of a child that cannot quite process the gravity of a situation.

That's where the memory ends.

I can't place what happened immediately after, yet what I do know is that the memory stayed with me, and when my cerebral cortex developed enough neuronal connections to abstract the impact of the event, I scoured books and the internet to know more about it.

9/11, the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid several years later linked to Al Qaeda, oil, the Jumping Man, the heart-breaking recorded calls from the passengers on a plane they knew was not going to land, the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, countless documentaries (some reputable, some sensationalist).

I was fortunate enough to avoid the catastrophic emotional debris of losing someone in the tragedies, so perhaps that helped the unbridled fascination.

Where am I going with this?

Well, it is highly likely that I know more about the terrorist attack than the average regular person in Europe, and again one of the few people of my generation that spends this much time thinking about something that happened twenty years ago.

And that's wrong. Everyone should remember.

The problem is that the remembrance I am referring to does not align with that of the general public, the one marred by nauseating American patriotism and ideas of bloody retaliation.

No.

The remembrance I defend is how humans keep succumbing to outdated ideas of countries' supremacy over others and to avarice. How a terrible event that ended with thousands of American lives in a matter hours led to the end of almost a million lives over the course of a decade after that, and the displacement of almost 37 million others.

Remembrance not to seek blame or revenge. Remembrance to never reach the abominable climax that was 9/11 ever again.