It’s September 11. According to some people, it should feel significant, but it certainly doesn’t too me. I didn’t think of the date until I saw people’s away messages reminding me. It’s certainly not that I’ve forgotten the events, but there has been SO MUCH overkill in the past 2 years, its hard to feel like I should sit around “remembering.”

What I will always remember is where I was when I found out. (Cliched, I know)

I was at Hampshire when it happened, walking back from my 9:00 AM Philosophy class. The events had already began when class started, and had commenced by the time we ended, but we didn’t know it. I was walking past FPH and saw Phil, a crazy guy from my orientation group talking with some of his activist people about how he had to get online and see what some alternative news site was saying. I thought nothing of it.

I ran into Yuli and Antonias, two people I will never see again in my life on the path between Dakin and STAR and they told me about the Pentagon bombing, then I ran into John going into the building who told me about the World Trade Center. It was very surreal, but thats what everyone says. It is so strange to think that I was at Hampshire, a year that feels like it was a dream, when what will probably go down as the most significant historical event of my lifetime occured. It’s just very weird, and I can’t explain why.

There are people here, who, like last year, are using it as an opportunity to bash Bush and his decision to bomb Afghanistan afterwards, which is just…irritating. They rant and rave about the sanctity of human life, but use a supposed “Day of Rememberence” to talk about how the lives of Afghani people (whom they’ve forgotten since the War in Iraq) are so valuable, etc.

I’m not being very articulate, perhaps because I feel emotionally detached from most of it. Everyone has a story about what they were doing on that day, and mine is trite, without any real meaning. Its just something I’ll always remember.

There were the endless broadcasts that showed the towers falling, over and over and over again, there were the Special Editions of Time and Newsweek, there were months and months of stories about the survivors and about the victims family left behind. The details eventually blur, and everyone becomes jaded from too much information. The event turns into something else entirely — a way to glorify ordinary people, who may or may not have helped crash a plane in Pennsylvania to stop it from hitting Washington, a widow, who gets attention, even though thousands of other women are widowed every day. A newly single mother, whose kids get scholarships, when thousands of other kids whose fathers died in car crashes or other mundane ways can’t afford college. Its a way to make us feel better about what we couldn’t control, I think.

Twenty years from now, save the endless broadcasts of the towers falling, I probably won’t clearly remember most of this stuff, unless someone reminds me. But walking up the path between Dakin and STAR, I probably will.