While it has only been around ten years since 9/11 itself, it has also only been 19 years since the beginning of my life. I grew up with idea of terrorism and 9/11, and, not surprisingly, my attitudes towards terrorist attacks have grown, for lack of a better word, themselves.
I remember being a very young child, in second or third grade, when the attack happened. I first heard about it as my young classmates and I were being herded from my art class back to our home base. Someone who used to be a good friend, who has succumbed to mediocrity and excessive drug use, told me that two airplanes hit the twin towers. At such a young age I had no idea what that meant at all. Even after our teacher explained what had happened I still didn?t realized what it really meant. I had no idea what significance the twin towers had and I didn?t understand why it was such a big deal that this happened in America. When I went home my mom and dad were acting very hysterically, my dad had to be evacuated from his sky scraper even though we were in the Twin Cities. Even though I didn?t feel sadness, I couldn?t stop watching the TV. See, I?ve always had an odd association with excitement and disasters. No matter the kind, from tornadoes to terrorism, I?ve always been that way. So this time even though I had no idea what was going on in reality, I knew that it was something, and I was excited about it.
           As I grew older, into middle school and early high school, my emotions and reaction, pertaining to that particular event, intensified. My Corpus Callosum fused and I began to process the world around me. I watched every anniversary special on all of the regular channels: TLC, Discovery, History. I became extremely emotional when thinking about the attacks and even the principal of them. In middle school I was a staunch conservative, partly because of my father, but I think it also had to do with my patriotism. The concept of an attack on our home soil seemed to be a fundamental affront on my childhood. As I progressed into high school things changed.
           I became a blue-blooded liberal. I began to fiercely follow global affairs, and learned about many different perspective and events. Now, I wasn?t only absorbing the US perspective on 9/11, but the world perspective. It seemed to me that while the rest of earth was sympathetic, they could not empathize. My emotions began to shift as well. As I watched a video in my Middle East topics class, I realized that there were people crying around me. I had little to no emotion while watching video of 9/11. I thought their attachment to the event was ridiculous. I thought ?how can we empathize if we were in 3rd grade when this happened?? We obviously had no idea what was going on at the time and compared to our level of comprehension now, we weren?t absorbing anything from that day. I think that I realized on that day, that even though my generation was present in America that day, we are still outsiders when it came to 9/11.
           To this day, that is still one of my biggest wishes. I want to go back to 9/11 and be a little bit worldlier. I wish that I could have been there that day and felt what an adult would have felt. I want to know what it was like to see, feel, and know that the world was changing.

Benjamin Goggin