I shed a small tear yesterday as I heard a small piece on the radio commemorating the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. The piece was genuinely moving, but, sentimentalist radio programming aside, the event it chronicled was so profoundly tragic and mind-boggling devastating that you couldn't help be moved by it.
A lot of people I knew watched the events almost live as they unfolded on the news. I didn't have the TV on at the time. With the time difference between New York and Sydney being what it is, the first plane hit at 10:46pm Sydney time, and I went to bed about then. I heard nothing until I woke up to go to the beach at 6am - on the radio alarm clock they were talking about some major tragedy involving planes flying into buildings. I launched out of bed and fired up the TV to see it for myself....
...Words failed me. There was just nothing I could do or say. I felt powerless but I felt so profoundly saddened by what I was seeing.
Even now, it's still so hard to put into words what I feel. There's no doubt that this event changed the world and the lives of people living on the other side of the world as well. As Australians, our neighbours in Bali had their own tragedy just over 12 months later when a bomb took out 88 Australian nationals in the Sari club.
As a result of this, the world became a hotbed of paranoia and general fear. More terror attacks happened in the years since, two wars have been fought, Middle eastern dictators have been forcibly removed and more. In the immediate 12 months after the event global finance markets took a hit, consumer confidence plummeted, tourism crawled to a stand-still. Evan as far as people not wanting to eat out anymore caused issues, with heaps of small businesses shutting down. Indeed, our local pizza place closed with months of this tragedy, but that could have been through other issues too...
...either way, things were never the same anymore...
...Lest we forget.
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