By Luka Secilmis, Year 12
My parents sat at home that day, dreading the phone call that would confirm my father’s lung cancer. As they alternated between feeding, and changing the diapers of the 7 months old me, they got informed what was happening in New York City. At 14:46 United Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower. 17 minutes after, Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. 2,996 people died the day that my father got the call that confirmed he had lung cancer. Cancer, however, felt almost minuscule to both my parents at that moment, as they both watched the first South Tower collapse at 15:59 on CNN News. Flash forward 10 years later. My friend and I were assigned 9.11.2001 as our “important dates in history project”. I went home, sweaty and hungry from playing football with friends, and asked my mother why that date was significant. I clearly remember her answer. She said that “really bad men flew two planes into big towers in lower Manhattan, and killed thousands of people.” Back then I was puzzled on what I had just found out. As I looked at pictures of the twin towers in class next day, I felt horrified, and just couldn’t understand why one would do something like that. Pictures of smoke, men with FDNY and NYPD jackets, people falling to their deaths, remained with me, and overtook my thoughts that day.
A similar horrification remained with me as I learned of the Crusades, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, other Genocides, and of things like rape, racism, and torture. I never did and will understand the motive, justification, and lack of humanity in these acts. Having witnessed recent terror attacks directed at Europe starting with the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and the more recently, the London stabbings, I have started to feel helpless and worried, as my culture and world stands under attack. As these attacks accumulate, I can only imagine how the world felt when 9/11 occurred. Yesterday I stood at Ground Zero. It was rather silent, the sound of water, circulating through the memorial, being the most dominant of sounds. A crowd of people stood around the memorial, their hands almost caressing the surface which carried people’s names. Like the rest of the crowd, I let my hand fall onto the memorial, and gazed into the moving water. I spent a while thinking of all I just mentioned, the complexity and magnitude of these despicable events. I thought of the debates I’ve had, the fights, the essays I’ve written in class, the discussions. That train of thoughts derailed as I noticed the name my hand rested on. Jeffrey Alan. I stared at the name for a while, not knowing who he had been, who he had loved, what he had done, what he could have been. I didn’t know his age, his favourite band, his nationality…I didn’t know anything about him. Looking at innocent Jeffrey’s name, I came to the realization that none of that mattered. It all boiled down to the same thing, regardless of his ethnicity, race, doings, favourite band. He was an innocent human, like all the other thousands of names surrounding his. I forgot about the debates, the reasons, complexity surrounding 9/11, and other topics, like the holocaust or any other despicable human crime ever committed. That is when sadness overtook me:
How could a human being do something that “bad” to another human being?
