Remembering 9/11/2001

To the Swarthmorean,

Twenty years ago on September 11, I was a senior in high school. It was a beautiful morning, hardly a cloud in the sky—that type of blue that can only be seen on the East Coast. I was in my morning AP calculus class, where I was struggling. One of the vice principals came and knocked on our door and spoke quietly to the teacher. She announced what had happened to the class. We kept on with our math problems.

That day I walked around the high school in a daze, completely overwhelmed. I don’t remember going to my remaining classes. If the same thing happened today, with the post-9/11 security measures and paranoia about students being in classrooms at all times and needing hall-passes, I don’t think I would be able to do the same thing.

After 9/11, I fell apart. I lost who I was. I lost the trajectory I had been on for my whole life. The stock market crashed, our college savings and peoples’ life savings were obliterated, and my life changed forever. The lives of our young men and women who chose to go overseas changed far more than mine. The lives of the people that were lost on that day can never be reclaimed. I had never seen such an outpouring of international support for the people of the United States in my entire life, and I have never seen it since. Thinking of the things we lost on that day makes me feel like my recollections are so trivial. But we all were affected by that day.

If I could go back to my senior year and turn things around, I would give a lot to be able to do so.

Parisa Zangeneh
Galway, Ireland
(formerly of Wallingford)