By KIERA BRENNAN
I was the first child called out of my first grade class on Sept. 11, 2001. My father worked in the city, a street or so away from the towers. My mother wrestled with her explanation of why I was going home so early. She could not answer the questions I had in ways I could understand. I just understood that my dad was okay and my brother was okay. I was okay, and that was what mattered.
Our generation is not okay. Our older siblings comprehended the news stories and the explanations that were fed to them, whether they wanted to or not. Our younger siblings were too young to even attempt a deeper understanding. Our peers, however, received muddled, half-understood answers from the television and adults, afraid to upset us.
I remember that day very clearly; I know my classmates do, too. We remember and through time, we have begun to understand.
Sept. 11, to our generation, means the end of the invincible America. Our generation has seen the end of boarding planes without hours of security or the total comfort that nothing will go wrong.
Our generation has never known America when it was not at war with an enemy that had a forever changing face.
Our generation saw and absorbed 2,977 lives lost in an instant; we were elementary school students, already desensitized to violence.
Our generation, at a time when we were still learning how to read and write, lost loved ones and lost that blind, innocent trust in the safety of the country we live in.
The upperclassmen, the oldest students in CHS, were only in first or second grade on Sept. 11, 2001. Too young to understand, too old to just be told, “You’ll be okay, I promise,” by our parents. As we grow older, and our memories begin to rely on the words of our television sets, we as a generation must look at the America we live in to see how Sept. 11 changed our world. Our understanding has grown past blissful ignorance towards a grim comprehension that has shaped our generation and the America it lives in.