Students reflect on September 11th
By: Matt Fiebke
Staff Writer
If you were to ask someone to name off the icons of the New York City skyline you may get the same answers; the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and some may now say One World Trade Center. There was once two more behemoths in that skyline, the Twin Towers.
On September 11th 2001, The United States was attacked by terrorists from the muslim extremist group Al-Qaeda. Four planes were hijacked that day. One hit each of the Twin Towers, one hit the pentagon, and one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania -the result of passengers attempting to take back the plane from their murderers. Nine days later on September 20th, President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” in a state of the union address.
Seventeen years have passed now, and in that time Bush declared “mission accomplished”, Obama said “yes we can”, and Trump vowed to “make america great again”. A new generation has grown up under the shadow of this historic event, whether it affected them or not.
“I think of a tragic event that occurred in our country, and how we kind of came together as a whole. We didn’t care about race, ethnics, beliefs. We stood together, and we stood strong [and] we overcame this,” said Emily Rugari, an 18 year old in the teaching program.
Seventeen years later and in today’s political climate, one could find it hard to imagine such unity. Some students are acutely aware of these types of divisions.
“We see people that are [from the Middle East] as bad people because of the people that attacked on 9/11,” said auto technology student, Brendan Kurtz. “[Middle Eastern people are] seen as a threat and they’re really not. People don’t know their backstory or where they came from. They look at them as a threat because of where they or their family came from.”
Lulaah Saleh, a computer science student has experienced prejudice first hand. She moved to this country from Yemen five years ago. “I was going to school and then an old man came onto the bus and was talking about 9/11. I didn’t know English at that time, but I understood what he was saying.”
Saleh says that there are many people who see one example of a situation and judge everyone who is from that same demographic
“When I was in my country I didn’t know about the [9/11,]” Saleh said. She learned about it after moving over to the United States while she was attending school here. “The event itself was historical for me, like it was in the past and that’s it. But people [in the United States] still talk about it.”
Next, I wanted to hear from an older student. Someone that maybe remembers firsthand what happened that day. I encountered one such student, Sammy Foda, a 27 year old autoCAD student. I was surprised to hear a lot of what he said, especially when bringing up his half-Egyptian ancestry.
Many Hudson Valley Students still remember the event. Sammy Foda, an autoCAD student was just a child when the event occur. “My interpretation [of [9/11] when I was that young was that muslim people were attacking America, so there must be something wrong with muslim people.” Foda’s father was Muslim and he remembers being confused.
Foda remembers a few years after the disaster when he woke up late one night to banging on the door. “It ended up being the police and they were looking for a terrorist and my dad actually knew the guy,” Foda said. The man the police were looking for had been put on a terrorist watch list because he did not have his visa papers correct.
What does 9/11 mean to this younger generation of students? Lots of different things. But time marches on, and even as we still observe this tragic event, it’s not a defining moment for most. It will eventually slip from personal memory, into a historical event.
Students will never forget 9/11, but they press forward into the world to shape it for themselves. Though they live in the shadows cast by the events of that September day, they all touched upon the same theme- unity. If this new generation is to take away anything from 9/11, there could be worse things than that.