A Day to Remember

For each generation there is a day that really defines it. It is date that everyone who was old enough to know what was happening can remember where they were. For my grandparents’ generation it was December 7, 1941. For my parents’ generation it was probably July 20, 1969. For my generation it is most definitely September 11, 2001.

Everyone has their story, I remember it well and I also have a lot of notes from that day that I took and have kept now for 13 years. It was my Senior year of high school and I had the opportunity to report on it on our school’s daily announcement broadcast, where I was the newsroom reporter. It was a great experience, one of the few pieces of “hard news” that I reported on and it changed the way I looked at life and the world.

Now, 13 years on, I am now a husband and father. I spent two years living abroad and experienced other cultures and ways of life. I have seen how my peers’ lives have been shaped by this event and those things that followed because of it. On this day each year we have a sort of reverence for the day and post messages remembering where we were and those who lost their lives. It is a universal point of reference for Millennial Americans.

When someone says “Nine-Eleven” I know exactly what they are referring to and I like hearing others’ experiences from that day. It is not to say that other generation don’t have the same reaction to it, but for Millennials it is the first, and really the only, date that defines the times that we live in. It has really changed many things, either directly or indirectly.

We are either witnesses of history or participants of it. The wars, the economic recession and everything else that has happened in the last 13 years is called the “post 9-11 world.” That world is more and more being shaped by those who were just coming of age in 2001. Is the world better or worse than it was before? How are we working to make that world better?