Ten Years Ago

I slept in on September 12, 2001.

I was eighteen years old, living at home, working at a camera shop in West Auckland and pulling a whopping $350 per week. I spent this money on bad CDs, awful clothes, cheap drinks and product to support my ridiculous hairstyle. My work week ran from Saturday to Wednesday - Thursday/Friday was my weekend. The sum of all these parts became the fact that I slept through 9/11.

In the hazy snooze-zone between naps that morning I remember hearing the sound of the TV (the fact that this was on in the morning was, in itself, rare) and garbled conversations between my mother and younger brother. I caught words like "attack", "New York" and "terrorist" - but, by virtue of being apathetically eighteen I dozed off again.

When I rose a couple of hours later I turned on the TV and was dumbfounded by the images pouring across the screen - images that have been played and replayed thousands of times but never lose their poignancy. I rang my mother at work, my first words to her "what the hell is going on?"

I spent the rest of the day glued to the live feed from CNN that was being relayed via TVNZ. I realised then that I was watching history unfolding. I cursed myself for not getting up earlier. Throughout the day I thought a number of things (some astute, others inane) about what I was witnessing. Things like "Jesus, those people are jumping from REALLY high up", "Where was the plane that crashed into the field heading?" and "It'd suck to be George Bush right now".

In the ten years that have passed a sequence of events that I am nowhere near qualified enough to detail have unfolded. I offer no commentary on these except for this (and I'm choosing these words carefully):

I believe that the group that has felt the repercussions of 9/11 more than any other are American Muslims. I fervently believe that terrorism is inherently despicable and that a loss of life on ANY scale should not be taken lightly or diminished in any way. By the same token it is important to remember that the atrocities of that day ten years ago were conducted by fanatics. This is a fact that many overlook as they heap prejudicial and unjustified blame upon entire communities.

And whilst I sincerely would not wish the grief felt by the victims of 9/11 (by this I mean those who lost loved ones so horrifically) upon anybody, I think it is important to note that Muslim communities across the world will be labelled, second-guessed, profiled and looked upon with suspicion and trepidation for many, many years to come.