Response to an Australian friend on "Why is 9/11 such a big deal?"

If you want to know what happened on 9/11, you can find a bazillion different websites offering different views, different perspectives, different theories and different degrees of memorialization. But you didn't ask what happened. You asked why it was such a big deal. So... Settle in, my lovely... These are the Words According to Jacque, and thus, should not be counted as gospel or truth, but merely an opinion... an unresearched and uncited opinion. Any facts I use to back up my arguments will not refer to their source and should, therefore, be taken with a grain of sand. It is the first thing a researcher must do to separate fact from fiction. Facts can easily be made up... but facts and opinions backed up with legitimate sources are more credible than those that cannot be.

With that out of the way... Why was 9/11 such a big deal?

I could start with the facts that most of us know by now. The whole two planes crashed into the World Trade Center thing... the whole two big buildings fell down and lots of people died. This is like saying that a grocery store sells food. It's narrowing down a million different individual pieces of information, twisting each thread into one huge generalization. Each of those pieces of information is important though. I'm not going to get into specifications on most of those pieces of information. I will tell you my opinion on why the events of 9/11 are such a big deal.

First... Let me paint you a picture of America pre-2001. American History... it's long, drawn out, going back a long time... but not super long. First there were the Indians who lived here. Then Vikings came and did Viking stuff along the coasts - buried treasure and all that jazz. Then Christopher Columbus, the idiot, thought he was sailing from Spain to India, but he got all confused because he forgot to stop to ask for directions and ran into land... so he called the people he saw Indians because he was a white man and white men are never wrong... So, people were like 'Wow, land? Let's settle it and claim it in the name of (insert country name here)!' So people from Spain came over, and from England, and from France and everyone was like 'I saw it first! It's mine!'... and they got all fight-y about it... So there were wars and stuff... and the English were being such douche bags about it that everyone who settled here got mad... they were like 'Don't tell us what to do! We're over here on this side of the water and you're over there on that side of the water and you can't control me!'... and the English were like 'Yes we can!'... and the French were like 'Eh, that's not nice. We don't like the English' so they helped the colonists fight the English because they were fuckers.

Okay... so that's this whole Revolutionary war thing... where we (the colonists) fought for independence from self important imperialists (England). Long story short, the colonists won the war and  1776, they decided to write up a piece of paper that said "Hey, ya'll, we're a country." That's the Declaration of Independence. It's an important document to us. Like the Constitution.

The important thing about this is this: The United States was founded on the idea of Freedom. Okay. Freedom. What is it? (Alright, I know I said I wouldn't cite my sources, but it gets pounded into you when you're writing papers for classes, so I can't help it... and this is a VERY important point I'm trying to make - the basis for my entire argument right here... so... I'm gonna get all scholarly and shit. Deal.)  According to Dictionary.com, Freedom is... wow... it's a lot of things... but I'm going to pick and choose from the definitions it gives to give you an idea of what freedom is to an American.

Freedom is: "the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint."

It is: "exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc."

It is: "civil liberty, as opposed to subjection to an arbitrary or despotic government."

It is: "the right to enjoy all the privileges or special rights of citizenship, membership, etc., in a community or the like."

Freedom is a lot of things. There's a bajillion different definitions on Dictionary.com... but I realized as I was transferring them here that I'm making this boring. Scholarly shit is boring. This is not scholarly. This is... well, it's me trying to 'splain somethin.

Essentially, some of the main things you need to think about, the most important thing you need to know about America is that we were founded on freedoms. Freedom of religion. Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Lots of Freedoms, lots of Rights... Because at the beginning, we were all sick of being oppressed by that dude over in England. (He liked to tax us, so we threw tea in the harbor to piss him off)

Ok... so.. 1776, this country was founded... Yay. There was a civil war in the 1800s between the north and the south, people who wanted to abolish slavery vs people who didn't... it was nasty... but we got over it. The north won, slavery was abolished, cotton still grew.

Our country got to be pretty proud of itself... I mean, we're kinda a new-ish country... and we were prosperous and we could be pretty much self sufficient without the need to have to trade with other countries... but we decided we liked electronics, so we traded wth Japan... and we liked cheap plastic crap so we traded with Taiwan... that kinda thing... But essentially, we got big heads... we got comfortable... In the early 1900s, WWI broke out in Europe... and we came in with this "Don't worry, we'll fix it" mentality... and we were on the winning side! Yay! So we decided "Hey, guess what! We're military geniuses and we like to keep the peace, so we're going to put people in your country to tell you how to run your country because our Democracy thing is fucking awesome and ya'll should do it too..."

Well, some people didn't like that. Like Japan.

During WWII, America once again was all "Hey ya'll should stop fighting because we said so and we're awesome because we have all these freedoms and stuff"... And Japan was like "Fuck you" and they bombed Pearl Harbor (It's in Hawaii). So America went from being the biggest bully on the playground to suddenly getting slapped in the face in front of the whole world by this tiny little Asian kid...

Yeah... It wasn't pretty. It was the first time war had ever been brought to American soil. The Revolutionary war didn't count because we weren't a country then... and the civil war didn't count because that was us hating on each other. This was a foreign country bitchslapping us...

So yeah... we did the whole WWII thing, fought, killed people, won... Got to be the biggest bully on the playground again after bombing the everloving fuck out of that tiny Asian kid, putting him in a fucking coma.

And then 9/11 happened... 60 years later. (Irony = The movie, Pearl Harbor, was released in 2001.... the same year as the second attack on American soil....)

Ok.... So... why is 9/11 a big deal?

On September 11, 2001, I was 19. I was home alone. My parents were in Colorado for the summer, which was normal for them. I had class that morning. Gerontology - the study of old people... normally I slept through the class because it was an early morning class and I generally didn't give a shit. I took the class only to get my sociology credit and rationalized it to myself that my parents were old... so I was learning about my parents.

My alarm woke me up that morning. It was set to the radio. When my alarm went off, it was nothing but sirens... screams... chaos... pandemonium. Not a normal thing to wake up t, and definitely sets your mood for the day. I went upstairs to flip on the tv and I saw the World Trade Center, one of the buildings, smoking. What the fuck? At this point, I wasn't creeped out or anything... shit happens. Wow that sucks, hope everyone's okay, gotta get to class.

And then, as I stood there, I watched the second plane fly into the second tower... right... there... live...

Just like practically all of America... we watched these people fly into this building... we watched these people die.

Still, we stood there, watching the tv, the entire country was crowded around televisions, radios... all of us... the ENTIRE COUNTRY... watching this... because someone hijacked these planes... At first, there was so much confusion about everything. We thought bombs, we thought... accident?... but that second plane... the one we all watched... As a country, we all gasped, our hands to our mouths in horror... All of us... as one.

We thought it was over then... the attack was done. Clean up the wreckage, move on.... And then the first building started falling.... The World Trade Center was like a national icon... It was to New York what the Statue of Liberty is... It was to New York what the Golden Gate Bridge is to San Francisco, what the Pyramids are to Egypt... what the Opera House is to Sydney.... In that moment, the World Trade Center WAS America...

And it was falling.

There were thousands of people still inside... trying to get out... calling home for help... jumping from the windows to plummet to their deaths just to escape the hell of the fire that was inside.

That was just when one building fell.

And then... the other fell.

Just like that... All those lives... all that symbolism... nothing but smoke...ash...

The whole country watched the whole thing.

So why was 9/11 such a big deal? Because it wasn't just America that it hit... I was 19 years old... living in Omaha, Nebraska... middle of the country... far far away from the World Trade Center... I knew nobody in New York... I knew nobody directly impacted by a death, a loss, a missing person... But I will NEVER forget 9/11...

After this happened... I decided I didn't want to be alone. I drove to my best friend's house... and I took watercolors and paper... and we sat and talked about it, painting on her porch. It was eerie... because not only were there not a single plane in the sky... (there was a no fly rule across the whole country that day... Although President Bush flew into the Air Force Base just south of Omaha and we watched his plane, terrified that it was another hijacked plane, that it would crash into us...) The birds wouldn't even sing. There was no traffic. Everything was... dead. It was like everyone just... held their families close that day... everything else was put on hold and we all... held on to what we had.

What was 9/11 such a big deal? Because we all watched it happen. We all saw them die. We could do nothing... and we learned then that we really aren't the biggest meanest boys on the playground anymore.

We got a taste of our own mortality.

And we didn't like it.