Fourteen years later

Every adult reading this column remembers where they were and what they were doing fourteen years ago today. I was with the woman I was seeing at the time and we didn't have the television on. When she left for work, I started getting ready to go to the college. A few minutes later she called me. She was at the Student Center with the television on and she told me that two planes had crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and that we were obviously under attack from somebody.

I hurried to the college, met my first class and took them over to the Student Center to watch what was happening on the big screen television. It was one of the scariest days in American history because not only did two passenger jets crash into the World Trade Center, another jet crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth one crashed in a field because passengers were fighting with the people who had taken over the cockpit. We eventually discovered these were terrorists, carrying out a plot devised by Osama Bin Laden. We were at war once again but this time we weren't sure who we were at war with.

9/11 changed people's lives in a profound way because we had been attacked at home; something that hadn't happened since the Civil War and then it was us attacking us. We had all become convinced that any war we would become participants in would be fought on foreign soil, not our own and we reacted quickly by passing the Patriot Act. Even though it curtailed several freedoms we had long enjoyed, it did what it was designed to do and that was to keep terrorists from repeating this tragic act in America again.

I remember the column I wrote that week in response to the events that took place on 9/11 and how outraged I was just like almost everybody else was. That was a knee-jerk reaction based on a sudden scary event like all of us have from time to time at an individual level. I was ready to do whatever it took to hunt down the wrongdoers and execute them on the spot to make sure that events like that would never happen again. None of us realized how difficult that would be and we could never have dreamed that we would still be fighting this battle fourteen years later.

But we are and there's no end in sight. Radical ideologies have invaded the thinking of many young men and women world-wide, including the United States, and there's no way of stopping it from happening. There's no way because it's not a country we're at war with, it's a belief system and it's impossible to kill a belief, no matter how wrong-headed it is.

We still remember the horrible events that took place on 9/11 but they're not as prominent in our thoughts now as they were then. My girlfriend was scared, my students were scared, practically everyone I knew was scared because nobody knew what was going to happen next. As it turned out, not much of anything happened next on American soil because we were fighting wars on foreign soil again. So we calmed down, went back to thinking about the daily events that impacted our lives and didn't spend that much time thinking about terrorism anymore.

That's what our President wanted us to do so that's what we did. But there's something at the back of our minds now that didn't used to be there. It's an awareness that we can be attacked again when before 9/11 we didn't think we could be attacked at all. And no matter where we go or what precautions we take, we can never again feel truly safe and protected because another attack could come from anybody at any time.

And that's an unnerving fact of life that will be with us forever.