It was a calm morning, 10 years ago. The skies across the eastern seaboard were tranquil, and the air was crisp.
Ten years ago, the young men and women who are now freshmen at USF St. Petersburg sat wide-eyed staring at their third-grade teachers, the air smelling of crayons and plastic and glue. They were enjoying those first hopeful weeks of learning, where anything was possible and nothing was hard.
Ten years ago, President George W. Bush sat at the front of a second-grade classroom in Emma E. Booker Elementary School just across the bridge. He told a tale of a goat that ate everything in its path, driving its owners mad. The children, dressed in white shirts and dark pants, listened intently from their chairs.
Ten years ago, a man entered that classroom and whispered words into President Bush’s ear.
Ten years ago, we realized the world had changed.
Nineteen men hijacked passenger jets that were filled with people—people flying to meet loved ones, relax on vacation, or to complete work errands. The men flew those people into the hard world, sending it spinning on a course on which it was never meant to spin.
On televisions, radios and the still fledgling Internet—10 years ago—we watched and listened as chunks of concrete, aluminum, steel and flesh tumbled from the sky onto the streets of Manhattan. We witnessed the government’s horror as its own Department of Defense was torn to pieces in our Capitol. We saw a crater open in the soil of Pennsylvania that was between eight to 10 feet deep and 30 to 50 feet wide.
Ten years ago, we watched with sadness as 2,996 of us left this world.
Would they recognize the world they left? Much has changed, in the past 10 years.
Two wars have since reopened the earth and kept it open. Over 6,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani citizens rest alongside those lost on that September morning, 10 years ago.
Words and names like body scanners, Sharia, DHS, Guantanamo Bay, nationalism, Saddam Hussein, waterboarding, PATRIOT, jihad, wiretapping, Rev. Terry Jones, TSA, Word Trade Center mosque, Osama bin Laden and liberty have faded in and out as hot topics in the American lexicon, and touched the lives of those who have never been within 1,000 miles of Manhattan.
And perhaps most symbolically, in the past 10 years the World Trade Center site has transformed from a pile of rubble to a tremendous hole, and finally, to the beginnings of a new beacon of glass and steel in the New York skyline.
The world was much different, 10 years ago. What will it look like 10 years from now?
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Beija
