9/11, Fear, and Osama bin Laden, to 11/08, Hope, and Barack Obama
I remember 9/11 well. I was 18. I was heading of to college, about to, for the first time ever, live away from home. I’d decided to move to California, halfway across the country from my hometown of Overland Park, Kansas, and on 9/11, me and my dad were halfway to California. We were in Flagstaff, Arizona, actually, on a quick stopover to visit the Grand Canyon.
That morning I turned on the TV to check ESPN. Instead, I found out the world I’d be entering college into a world completely different than the one I’d graduated high school from. The first thought on my mind as I saw the twin towers in flames – “please, let it not be Arab terrorists.”
I want you all to think for a second – on those first few days, when America was twisted inside out. I knew about the Japanese internments during World War II, of the history of slavery and subsequent Jim Crow segregation that had only ended when my dad was my age. As a brown American, not of Arab origin, but fully aware of the fact that most Americans could not tell the difference, I honestly wondered for a few days whether America would accept me anymore.
Fear gripped me.
Osama Bin Laden. He was everywhere. Terrorism had become communism of our era. My generation now had it’s JFK moment. Fear was pervasive, onmipresent. Not far from where me and my dad spent the following night, September 12th, at a hotel where the receptionist’s eyes were glued to pictures of Bin Laden on the news, Balbir Singh, a Sikh-American, was murdered in an hate crime for refusing to remove his turban.
It could very easily have been me. That was the world those days.
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