September 11, 2009
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8 years
It's 8 years today since the world as we knew it chaged completely. Gone are the days of carefree air travel. Gone is the time when you can feel safe, no matter where you go, no matter what you do. An enemy that had been in hiding, building slowly up, suddenly showed its face on 11th September 2001. With the destruction of the Twin Towers and subsequent events, the face of the whole planet changed suddenly.
I was living in southern California at the time, driving in to work in the VW Cabriolet, enjoying the sunshine and the wind blowing in my face, the sound of Extra Musica pounding the stereo, the African beats boom boom booming away. I got to the office and met a Filipina colleague outside, we lauhed and talked joyfully as we made our way to the office where we were hit by a wall of grief and despair. A place that was thought of as inpenetrable - the US mainland - had just been attacked for the first time.I was worried to be honest. Bush was nothing more than a moron in my mind, and I thought he would do something wreckless, like attack Mexico for selling them the burritos which the terrorists had eaten 6 months prior to the attack, but in the initial phase after the towers had crumbled, Bush announced he would calmly look at the situation, not rush in to anything crazy or rash, and make decisions based on the information that he could get from his intelligence people. All very rational. Temporarily my view of the man changed for the good.At work that day, we all crammed in to the president's office to watch CNN's coverage which of ourse was non-stop. The feeling when the second plane went in, which we saw live, and when we saw the towers fall... you would have to be inhuman to not feel something. There was no business done anywhere in the US that day. Perhaps people went to the 7-Eleven for something, filled up with petrol, but to all intents and purposes, the US closed for business on 11th September.A few weeks afterwards, the US hit back properly, and when I say properly, I mean in typical US form which was hard, aggressive and in a not-properly-thought-through manner.When I brought back my cat from the US to Taiwan - having moved back to the island in January 2002 - I was stopped by a random search which would not have bothered me too much but it was stressful enough for Kahukura without being put back in to her cage and taken away from me, even if it was for just a few moments. But the queues for security at the airport had gone from whizzing through to taking off shoes, and waiting for literally hours. Anything that looked even remotely like it could be used as a weapon was taken away. It wet from one extreme to another as all of a sudden the US went safety mad.And today - eight years on - what has improved? Shorter queues and quicker times through security (slightly), no drinks taken through security (although I am not sure about how safe it is to have drinks behind security in the airport shops) and still taking off shoes, taking your laptop out of the case or whatever - depending on where y ou are flying from and to.The world may have been given a lot of lessons from 9/11. The question really remains though - have we truly learnt from it?
