9/11 - Ten years on

Next Sunday is the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Where was I? Preparing to go and work my extra shift at the local co-op at the age of twenty. I went to serve lottery tickets, alcohol and cigarettes to the customers as usual with a severe lack of understanding of what a momentous day it was.

In the weeks that followed I’m ashamed to say I switched off from the news. On arrival at university after leaving home for the first time I settled into my student life with no television. I never listened to the news specifically on the radio. My CD player only played Garbage and Radiohead at full volume. I hardly ever bought a newspaper in my first year. I pretended it hadn’t happened. I had let my membership of the Labour Party lapse and I was very cynical.

The only mention of it at university was the inauguration speech from the Vice-Chancellor. I remember shuddering at his words, “The world has changed forever.” Of course, at the time, you think it’s only you who feels terrified. Now, I’m not ashamed to admit it publicly. Terror is a normal emotion in our existence in 2011.

In the second year of my English degree, I began to wonder if all the year’s novels were going to be about 9/11. Should I be brave and write a story about it myself? I finally tackled the subject head-on for my dissertation in 2004 but it seems the best novelists waited until 2006 to touch the sensitive subject matter. Ian McEwan’s ‘Saturday’ is particularly poignant. In the scene below the main protagonist Henry Perowne is thinking about his son Theo making sense of the world:

'They’ve never talked so much before. Where’s the adolescent rage, the door-slamming, the muted fury that’s supposed to be Theo’s rite of passage? Is all that feeling sunk in the blues? They discussed Iraq of course, America and power, European distrust, Islam – its suffering and self-pity, Israel and Palestine, dictators, democracy – and then the boys’ stuff: weapons of mass destruction, nuclear fuel rods, satellite photography, lasers, nanotechnology. At the kitchen table, this is the early twenty-first century menu, the specials of the day.'

During the various events which followed I gradually became more aware of the implications. The Iraq war, 18 months later, began when I was halfway through my second year. The 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 happened when I was in Cornwall on a rare holiday.

As our liberties have been stripped away sharply in the last ten years I’m taking stock of all the things terror has inflicted on me. Policemen can now arrest someone for being in possession of photographs of London landmarks. 102,347 – 111,864 civilians have died in Iraq due to military action. Nearly 5000 US and UK soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq. I walk past women and children in my town who have lost their husbands and fathers in the war. Hatred of Muslims and Islam is approaching demonization.

Yes, it’s true what my then Vice-Chancellor said, the world really has changed forever.