The Way I Saw It: 9/11/01

I found this story on a piece of paper under my bed a while ago. It is about the way I saw 9/11. I don't believe I wrote it while I was six but rather a few years later. I'd date this around ages nine or ten. I typed it up as is, please excuse the grammar and incomplete sentences.

War to a child

Sitting inocently, playing with her sister, her Mother rushes to Tv. People on the screen talking frantically. Billows of smoke.

What Is Going ON!

Mother explains two very tall buildings have been hit by airplanes. Olders sister seems to understand. Everyone is so gloomy. It's rather confusing and consuming. A family that rarely watches TV has the news on. The only thing that makes any sense is that there is a pattern to the news. They repeat the same clip every fifteen. In between are reports of more terrorist destruction. Everthying is touched; even her birthday, the on month anniversary. The airplanes flying by seem rather frightful. The years pass, the war does not. It is continual. It slowly slips from the child's mind only to suddenly be brought back with a new "terror" report.

Will it end before her childhood is over?

I wrote this so long ago and yet the question is still valid. Will it ever be over? My childhood is quite gone. Yet the war and terror remains. Is this a passing phase or new era?

Theory #2

Today’s world offers many different gauges for success. In high school, success is often judged based on grades, test scores, athletic ability, or number of friends. Later in life, success gauges usually come in the forms of spouses, job, income, housing, or type of vehicles. People are often judged by what they achieved or what level of living they have managed to reach. The difficulty with this way of judging others lives is that it fails to take into consideration extraneous situations. No one ever starts on the same square in the game of life. Everyone is endowed with different opportunities and begin at different “life levels”. When this is considered, society’s current method of gauging success is not only very biased, it is also incredibly inaccurate. I believe that a better method would be that of gauging others improvement when determining whether they are a “success” or not (even thought that title is often arbitrary). When others are judged by their efforts at improving themselves, it doesn’t matter where they started or where they end up. What is truly important is that there is an endeavor to be a better person, daughter, husband, sister, etc… The person that is truly living every day striving to be, act, and think better than they had the day before is a true success in my eyes.