25 years ago, almost 3,000 lives were lost when planes crashed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon, and a farmer’s field killing thousands of people. Nothing has been the same since. It was a moment that changed the world.
I remember visiting my grandparents in Boissevain, MB and we would drive down to Lake Metigoshe in North Dakota for dinner. It was a real treat! Crossing the boarder was easy, with no more than a conversation. No IDs were checked. No mini-interrogation about why you're crossing the boarder. Nail clippers never used to be considered a dangerous weapon on an airplane, either.
Everything changed on September 11, 2001 and, 25 years later, it's all still the same.
10 years ago, as I was starting out in my theology degree, I wrote a paper about the September 11 attacks. It was probably one of my best papers and every once and a while I read through it, wondering if I could or should something more with it.
As we approached the 25th anniversary of these horrible events, I broke the paper out again. Reading through it, I shake my head because the world hasn't changed much over the last 2 decades. Everybody's at war with somebody. Fear is at an all-time high. And nail clippers are still consider a dangerous weapon on airplanes. Here is an excerpt from the paper:
"The attack on the World Trade Centre was a culmination of years of terrorism and war, disgustingly poor human rights policies, and some extremely faulty foreign policy within the US government with regards to counterinsurgency training and inconsistencies on who qualifies for US aid. On the surface it would appear that the attack was unprovoked and came out of nowhere. But as you begin to unravel the past, you can see a pattern in how the US deals with foreign nations and that it is quite likely that a group of people finally had enough and took justice into their own hands. Through mass and social media we have been essentially forced to accept the US as innocent bystanders who were seemingly attacked for no reason. But if you start delving into some history you will find that the US government was a far cry from an innocent or a bystander. From ignoring blatant human rights issues to taking both sides of a civil war it appears that the US has brought it on to themselves the fact that they are the target of multiple terrorist groups."
What I tried to do in my paper is attempt to show that it was the US government’s own inconsistent foreign policy that resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Centre and the death of 3,000 people. More than 3,000 as we are now aware of the deaths that were caused by health issues from the dust and chemicals that were in the air that day, and the days following.
Discussing such things as the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Kennedy Doctrine, the Nixon doctrine, the Somalia Syndrome, the Rwanda Genocide, the Persian Gulf War, and Bin Ladin and al Qaeda, I feel like I was able to explain how the US became a targeted superpower. It was a fascinating bit of research and certainly made me realize how the events of September 11 were not isolated, nor did they come out of nowhere.
On September 11, the world was changed forever. With the aftermath leading to a two-decade-long war is Afghanistan, and Islamophobia rates skyrocketing to numbers that really haven't come down much since then, we are still feeling the effects of those horrible events, even 25 years later.
Will I break out this paper again in 5 years? 10 years? Only time will tell. But I sure hope things start turning around soon. How long can one country remain at war with the rest of the world?
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