CURRENT AGE: 21
CURRENT AGE: 21
BEFORE 9/11
On a warm September morning, we sat in our elementary school classrooms and watched collapsing towers on T.V. We heard whispers of an attack, and many of our classmates were whisked out of school by nervous parents.
Most of our peers had similar experiences on 9/11/2001, a day that will always represent for us a jarring transition between childhood innocence and worldly awareness.
While covering the Democratic National Convention, several Y-Press members attended a speech by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a longtime anti-war activist and former 2008 presidential candidate. The hour-long session was hosted by the American-Muslim Taskforce on civil rights and elections.
Kucinich believes Americans need to return to a pre-9/11 mindset, free of this new-found suspicion of the unknown and paranoia of others.
"We know what 9/11 did, and how it created this metaphor of fear that has deeply infected our political discussions. We also know that the conversation that started after 9/11 really didn't reflect who we are. We're not a fearful people," he said.
Kucinich and his wife, Elizabeth, are attempting to create national "9/10 forums."
"The 9/10 forum is a way for us to…have a whole new discussion nationally. To be able to redefine who we are as a nation. While 9/11 was the day the world changed, 9/10 becomes a day to change the world," he told a small crowd at a Denver hotel.
Going back to a pre-9/11 mentality is not a return to innocence, Kucinich explains, but instead a way to achieve "truth and reconciliation" with the U.S. government and the wider world, as well as to challenge the policies that resulted from our post 9/11 fears.
Kucinich asked his 100 person audience in Denver to think about a time when they had been happiest or proudest before 9/11 and relate those moments to their worldview at the time.
That will be difficult for people like us who were in elementary school or younger in 2001. We were too young to see the relationships between our personal lives and the greater world, like our parents or grandparents could.
While Kucinich's efforts might lead to the kind of conversation America needs, we couldn't help but realize that we don't have a 9/10 perspective.We can only vaguely remember a time when we could meet a traveling parent at the gate of an airport, or go to a concert or ballgame without metal detection at the entrance.Because the governmental changes related to personal freedoms have been implemented as we've grown up, we cannot distinguish between the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 days of our own lives.
We have been taught to fear the rest of the world—especially the Middle East.
Kucinich challenges Americans to return to who we were before 9/11, when children could look forward to the future instead of regarding it with apprehension. Though we understand Kucinich's belief that we need to be more open and unafraid of people unlike ourselves, our generation cannot simply "go back" to the trusting American mindset of the past. Listening to Kucinich's speech, we identified with what the congressman was saying in a different way than the adults sitting around us: as young Americans, we would like to experience this "9/10" America for the first time.
Copyright 2008 Y-Press