You know what this post is about. I don't have to tell you. Just look at the date on it.
Fifteen years is a long time. I was seven then; I'm twenty-two now. The world has changed in ways that none of us could have imagined then. I certainly couldn't. I'm a weird case, too young to live in the old world but too old to live in the new one. "Normal" has changed forever and there's no real going back.
The aftermath was what my brain was first trained on, when trying to comprehend the outside world. Before the 2000 election I had only the vaguest notion of politics or current events. During the following year my progress leaving that cocoon was still very slow. The Twin Towers falling forced the process into overdrive.
For me, it's not a great tragedy. It was, but all those people dying wasn't an exception for me. In many ways that was the norm, the first major event I became aware of, something almost...prototypical. The rhetoric around terrorism certainly was. It's what I grew up on and I wonder what that's going to mean when my generation takes political power.
Fifteen years. It's my own life and still I can barely conceive of a timespan that long. Some long range thinker I am. Let's hope the next fifteen are better.
