Changes in America Since September 11, 2001

¶ … alarm woke me up. Crawling from bed to bathroom and back to bed, I lay there wishing I didn't have to go to school or work. I crept to the desk and turned on my computer before even thinking about getting dressed, eyes still half shut and glazed from a lack of sleep. Internet Explorer launched, automatically loading the Yahoo! Portal, where I half-heartedly read a handful of top news headlines, a brief local weather report, and checked e-mail, as I liked to do first thing in the morning.

I thought nothing much of the odd yet typically newsworthy photo of a plane hitting the first World Trade Center tower. Must be an accident, I thought. Some small private jet veered off-course, its pilot perhaps drunk. "Plane hits building,' the headline read. "Terrorism suspected." Nothing surprising there; terrorism was a household word far before September of 2001. Terrorists bomb boats and buildings all the time. Even if it were terrorists, big deal -- they hit an indestructible edifice on a suicide mission. We're indestructible, impenetrable.

No one attacks the United States. By the time I got to work both buildings had fallen. The world changed that day. It changed the psyches of almost every resident of the United States and perhaps the whole of North America. It changed the political and economic landscapes of the world, turning stable balances of power into shifty, tenuous uncertainty. It changed, or rather ended, the lives of millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq. September 11 changed media discourse and popular rhetoric.

Three years after the disaster, terrorism has gone beyond being a household word. Terrorism is now a political keyword, a hypnotic response word, even a word laced with racial and religious overtones. When the word is uttered, most people in the United States don't think of Colombia or Sierra Leone. They think of Saudi Arabians. Iraqis. Palestinians. Just about anyone who is, or even looks, Middle Eastern.

The term September 11 evokes far more than planes hitting the Manhattan twin towers and the Pentagon buildings, evokes far more than three thousand civilian lives lost in a day, evokes far more than the largest foreign attack on United States soil since Pearl Harbor. September 11 will from now on be a date that, like July 4, cannot be dissociated from its semantic significance. Just as July 4 means "Independence Day" and barbeques and summer fun, September 11 connotes terrorism, fear, and George W. Bush.

In the wake of September 11, the public has all but forgotten to question the whereabouts and wheelings and dealings of the Al Qaeda organization, which claimed responsibility for the attacks. September 11 changed the world by giving the Bush administration a blank check with which to write off the lives of Iraqi people -- because presumably there was a connection between that nation and that fateful day. The difference is also that with 9/11, the implications are felt around the world; September 11 was and is not only about the United States.

September 11 not only changed American semantics; the events that occurred on that day plus what has occurred in the years since that day, have changed the American lifestyle. One of the most obvious examples is that people are still afraid to fly. Many more are afraid to fly to certain parts of the world. Air travel is a huge hassle now: long lines at security screening points, officials making passengers remove their shoes, even their clothing.

People with Muslim last names or Middle Eastern facial features need to be prepared to be singled out, checked extra hard, even prevented from flying. In some cases, their fellow passengers point fingers and refuse to fly with a man donning a turban. Never mind that he's from India. No one can take nail clippers aboard a flight, and forget about that Swiss Army Knife. September 11 has changed the American media: its jargon, its approach, its tone.

The lingo is different these days; every story that can have a terrorist slant will. The media milks every opportunity to scare people with tidbits of relevant or irrelevant information. Incidents not related to terrorism will be painted so that they appear to be somehow related, such as a power outage. Politics are drastically different in the United States. About half the American public supports what the Bush administration has done in response to the attacks of September 11, while the other half scream out in protest.

With an election arriving in just a few months, all parts of the political spectrum are vying for.