|
I was in Spanish class when my principle announced that there had been attacks at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. My first thought was that a major world power had launched a surprise attack on the United States and nuclear war was likely to follow. I suppose you could write me down as one of the few individuals who overreacted to the initial news reports. I remember thinking about which one of my family's cars had the greatest fuel range, in the event we needed to leave town in a hurry.
They set up televisions at several spots throughout the school and I spent the next five hours or so watching the towers collapse over and over and over again. At the end of the day, my father drove to school to pick me up. To his immense relief, I already knew what had happened. He had been thinking all day about how he was going to break the news to me.
9/11 was the day I understood why my grandfather, to this very day, hates Japan. While I was aware that 9/11 and Pearl Harbor were two seperate events in different contexts, I had a new appreciation for Americans who had lived through that tragedy.
__________________
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
|