It's ten years on the day today and media is totally steeped in their self-obsession with it. Personally, I must shamefully admit that my main feeling is mostly a "it's been ten years already?" Time goes
WAY too fast!
Since it's apparently a fad to tell what you did when the news broke, I give my two cents. Back then I was trying to tie up the last loose ends of my uni education and go on to the next step of life (hah, how sadly wrong I was...) by writing my minor thesis in political science and turned on the radio just in time to stumble into what I at first believed to be some kind of parody show (since those very well could be like that back then) about planes crashing into skyscrapers. I think it was only when the reporter started talking about the Pentagon crash that I started listening for real. And then my writing was discarded for real-time political crisis studies on net and TV instead. Because however cynical it may sound that's how my mind works - it's into cold structural things much more than anything else. I'm a sucker for contingency plans and national crisis management. (I blame it on being an educational side-effect. You try study international politics, history and natural disasters and don't get affected by it.) And actually being able to
see the USA enact parts of the Cold War attack plans, close down the airspace and whisk the president away to the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska was in that aspect highly interesting and something I never thought I'd be able to see in reality.
Ironically enough, the main impact of the 11th September 2001 for me was that it went on to finally end my childhood views of USA as the "good democracy" and realize exactly how deep the cultural divide between Europe and the USA is. It didn't happen over a night of course, for a while after the terrorist attacks I even got a little more sympathetic to USA again, no matter how muddled and strange their voting system had turned out to be a year before. But a couple of years later things had changed profoundly. I still can't believe how a country could squander their immense goodwill in the world so effectively in just some short years. I mean, for all my lifetime up until the millennium they had been the "good guys" in our children (and young adult) minds. The defenders of democracy. Not the oil-hungry, over-spending, economy-crashing warmongers with bad respect for human rights and with high-profile candidates for political offices who in this part of the world would be described as right-wing extremists had they been locals. Whatever happened to the world?
All in all I prefer to keep more positively charged "do you remember"-dates on top of my personal days-that-changed-the-world list. Days like the 9 November 1989 and Christmas Day 1991. Those - and the time around and inbetween them - were events that meant a lot more to me, for many reasons. I was about to say that I miss that decade of freedom and happiness, but then I realized that would be in bad taste too, since it happened ugly things in Europe and the world during that time too. The world is a complicated, complex place in the end.
(I think I somewhere derailed my original train of thought during the writing of this. Sorry for the longwinded introspective rant or whatever it seems to have become.)