I posted this picture today because it's one of the last pictures I took before 9/11.
This picture is obviously flawed, but in context, that's okay. It was taken from my mom's Nissan Xterra on July 19th, 2001, while we were driving along what was most likely the Trans-Canada Highway from Montréal to my grandparents' cottage in Nova Scotia. I was 15 at the time, and although I'd been taking pictures for over 5 years by then, I was still young and not particularly experienced. The composition isn't very good, and there's glare on it, since I took the pic of this printed pic with my cell phone.
However, as I suggested above, I posted it today because it's a slice of time from the old world; the way things were before 9/11, which would happen two months later.
Today is obviously the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I know where I was when I first heard the news...I've documented that elsewhere. You know where you were, too, assuming you're old enough to remember.
There are adults alive today who hadn't been born on 9/11; who hadn't even been conceived yet.
And one day, several decades from now, there will be nobody remaining who remembers 9/11. It sucks, but it's inevitable. Just as how in the next couple of decades, there will be nobody remaining who lived through World War 2. These immensely significant events in our recent history will eventually fade into blips in the history books, or websites, or whatever medium is used far into the future. Kids in the distant future won't remember what year 9/11 happened, or who Osama bin Laden was. And that's not their fault. It's inevitable with the passage of time. Significant events now become insignificant later, even if we understand their importance.
9/11 happened a few days before my 16th birthday. I had just started Grade 11, and was still living in Newfoundland, with no knowledge whatsoever that a few years later my whole family would move to Ontario. I had one Muslim friend at the time who I met around 1998, but unfortunately, 9/11 basically shaped my view of what Islam stood for from that point on, and in the 20 years since then, my brain and biases can't help but waffle between the knowledge that there are tons of Muslims who would never do something so awful, and the handful who still hold a grudge against the West and would commit violence in the name of Islam.
Although now that I'm almost 36, and have consumed much more media in the years since 9/11, I certainly understand why some people in the Middle East (whatever their religion) would have resentments with the way Western (and Eastern) military powers have occupied their lands for so long. So perhaps those particular terrorists were less motivated by religion itself, and moreso with revenge for more practical matters.
On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I was living in Pickering in a two-bedroom basement apartment with a friend. I watched the commemoration at Ground Zero on TV. Barack Obama was the president at that time, and I watched Paul Simon play a moving rendition of "The Sound of Silence". I'd heard of Paul Simon, but wasn't consciously familiar with his music at that time. Curse me for my youth, right? I was also about to finish my time working at the Zoo after 7 summers there, and was a few months from embarking on my new education and career as an addiction counsellor.
On the 40th anniversary of 9/11, assuming I'm still alive, I will be 55 years old. And naturally, on the hundredth anniversary, there will be very few people alive who remember it, just like how there are very few people alive today who could remember even the slightest bits of World War 1. The oldest person alive today was born in 1903, so they would have been the same age when World War 1 came to an end as I was on 9/11. Both dates of incredible significance for those alive at those times.
This picture is shitty quality, but there's still something I like about it. You can see the Laurentian Mountains across the St. Lawrence river in the background as the sun sets, and the transport truck (perhaps carrying livestock to its untimely demise) is as nicely framed as could be by the SUV's window frame. Like so many pictures taken on 9/11 itself, of 9/11 as it happened in Manhattan or at the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania, the image quality is low by our modern standards, but the content; what is captured, is all the more significant because of the different era it represents.
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