Growing Up With Terrorists :: Living With Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, I walked downstairs to have my breakfast and turned on the T.V. since I was alone. Coincidentally, I turned to the right channel at the right time when the news was informing the nation about an event that would change our lives and leave a mark in history. Everyday, things affect us in ways we have never experienced, teaching us new lessons and information which help us grow as individuals, or in this case, also as a nation. Events that affect us personally tend to change our perspective on life and introduce us even more into the "adult" world. I had just been informed that our own American commercial airlines had been hijacked and run into the World Trade towers and the Pentagon. Later, on my way to school, they announced that the second of the twin towers had finally collapsed. We continued watching the news and discussing the current and upcoming events in each of our classes, and finally, as time went by, the story unfolded revealing who was behind it all and why they did it. In history, our teacher taped a T.V. special on the background of Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and their relations with America. Before I watched the special, I had never heard the name Bin Laden before in my life, and I did not really know anything about the Taliban either, except it was some group in the Middle East. I felt very naà ¯ve that it was possible that I did not know of something this big and important, and now I had a million questions to ask. Perhaps it is because I do not read the newspaper daily and rarely watch the news that this would come as such a shock to me. I have been relying on my friends, parents, and teachers for information on current events going on in the world, so I never felt the need to actually search for information myself because it had always been handed to me. I had no idea that I had been missing out on so many important details about our world, and now all the things that I had been missing out on were instantly making more headlines, and I was overwhelmed.