Remembering 9/11
While teaching tuition today I realized as I wrote down the date that it has been 10 years since September Eleven. As an 11 year old watching the BBC it was fairly surreal and disconnected, and since then it has come define a new paradigm, not just for terrorism or national security, but for a debater and now, a student of politics. What struck me a number of years ago and continues to strike me now is how it will be studied as an historical event by students not that much young for me, for whom this date has little more significance than the Cold War has for me. Why should this matter? Well in some ways it doesn’t, but as I was watching the delayed women’s semifinals or the US Open with that date printed on the side of the court, I reflect on many things, things like air travel and debating and political science and Interpol and the age of Bigger government. Who am I that these should matter, but a global citizen whose perusal of the Economist and all that it stands for and thinks rather somberly of the state of affairs.
