Remembering 9-11

So my first post in my blog about Saudi Arabia isn't really going to be about Saudi Arabia. But I think i'm well-justified if I talk about the anniversary of 9-11 today. It's hard to believe it's been 6 years. Six years since that afternoon we stayed glued to CNN.

Every American I've met since then, has told me that they remember exactly where they were when they learned of the attacks. And though emotionally, it impacted me much less than any american, I certainly remember exactly where I was: Having lunch while arguing with my brother about what to watch on TV. He wanted to see the news, I wanted to watch a M*A*S*H rerun. I guess it's lucky that he won the argument, because as soon as we switched to a news channel we saw smoke pouring out of the North Tower and knew something was up.

i have a friend who said that every american of this generation will remember where they were when they learned of 9/11, much like every american in the generation before that remembers where they were when they found out President Kennedy had been assassinated. I think she's probably about Americans, but I think Saudis relate to 9/11 in different way. If I had to guess, I'd say that not many Saudi remember where they were that fateful day. Yes, I'm sure that most Saudis today realize that we live in a post-9/11 world, and that everything that happens on the world stage today is colored by 9/11. But whereas 9/11 was a cataclysmic event for Americans, one that clearly cleaved their lives into a safe care-free pre-9-11 and a tense post-9-11 world, for us Saudis it's not the actual events on 9-11 that changed our lives. It was the aftermath. And only in retrospect to do we realize just how MUCH that one say has effected the history of the area.

I don't think I realized just how much the world was going to change when I first saw the twin towers come crashing down. By the time I went to school the next day though, I fully realized how big a deal this was. I will never forget the response of one of my schoolmates when I brought it up: "What? Those two buildings that fell down?" I still remember how utterly shocked I was by that ... probably more shocked than by the attacks themselves. The utter casualness in her tone were not so much a sign of heartlessness but of complete ignorance. True we were only 13 years old, but how a person could be so sheltered and wrapped up in their own cocoon as to not realize that the world's biggest terrorist attack has just occurred is still to me mindboggling. I wonder if she now remembers when it was that she first heard of the 9-11 attacks.