20 years

It was half a life-time ago but it is one of those days that a lot of the memories and reactions were clear. Back in the late-90s and early 2000s in New Zealand there weren't many global events that could simply reduce our public television to live recasting but 9/11 was the pinnacle event for such coverage. 

Me, I was a year back from my scholarship in Taiwan, had almost completed my university studies and had begun my ESOL teaching career. I was still living at home and with the talkback radio on and in an almost unbroken broadcast, I switched on the television to watch those loop replays, over and over again. Over and over again. I went to work where others, staff and students, who back in the non-smartphone era and potentially no early morning exposure to radio or morning TV, were only just learning about it just before class or even in class. Having a chance to prepare, I wheeled in the only mounted television into my class to show and discuss live. I recall how one teacher was aghast when a Chinese student was happy at the news. (He was in the Chinese military man, extraordinarily; he might have been genuinely elated, or like many in these moments perhaps not understanding the gravity of the moment. For context though, this was only five months after the Hainan Island incident where a US spy-plane crash landed on Hainan island, China.)

In the moment it is always hard to really know the gravity, significance or extent. It still boggles the mind the conception of the idea, the planning and preparation and then the execution of it, not to think of the actual atrocity itself, let alone the consequences from the mundane hypervigilance at airport security, or the fact that that a costly war and occupation of Afghanistan only ended last month. Or the cultural influence that you could measure in discrimination and similar movements and acts, including the one perpetuated at Countdown New Lynn.

On the day of the attack, I remember going to Club Space at Auckland Uni and talking about it with some AIESEC friends and used what I thought an apt word that I heard in the coverage. I said the attack was an audacious. One person asked me why I would use that word, suggesting that it was not the right word for something so repugnant as a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of almost 3,000 innocent people. It is with distance that I would still use that word, referring to simply one element of it, the masterminding and execution. Every other component is pretty horrific and karmic. 

With further time it becomes just a fascinating historical pivot, like when Gavrilo Princip shot into Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car; or the invasion of Poland; or the fall of Constantinople; the European discovery of the Americas; or the death of Mao.