So today is the 5 year anniversary of 9/11 and it seems like a depressing day. Being non-American, 9/11 didn't instill feelings of patriotism in me; it just always made me sad. 5 years ago, I was sleeping in bed, hitting the snooze button 4 million times as usual, and listening to some crap song on the Bear when one of the Bear DJ's came on and said that a plane had just slammed into one of the Twin towers and no one knew whether it was a mistake or an accident. She said that the airplane was just sandwiched in between the floors and I remembered not registering the gravity of the situation and thinking that it might be a joke, or a movie or something. Then, I went to class and was walking through SUB when I spotted the TV screens and all the people surrounding them, their eyes glued to the screen and the vivid images that were taking place before their eyes. And for days to come, all that was on television was the footage of the second plane hitting the second Twin Tower, and the destruction of the two towers, and zoomed in videos of people jumping and plunging to their deaths. The same macabre, grisly images on repeat; the same airplane flying into the tower from all imaginable angles, the morbidity forever burned into your retinas. I couldn't understand why they had to continually show the airplane hitting the tower, it was an image that everyone around the world had probably seen a hundred times by then, but it was on a continual, rewound loop that seemed to be the focus of all the television and media coverage. And the newspaper images of people jumping to their deaths from the upper floors, with bright red circles framing them just in case you missed it, or didn't understand what you were looking at it. However, I think after days upon days of being bombarded with images of death and destruction, everyone understood what the images were of. I hated the fact that Americans were spouting off about patriotism and civic duty and all that shit, while media peoples were having a field day with all the images of death. 9/11 shouldn't have been about patriotism and civic duty, it should have been about the people who died and the numerous lives that were destroyed needlessly. To take the focus away from the people who died and the lives that were destroyed and place the focus on "America" as a whole was an insult to all the individuals who died and the family they left behind. Because in the end, that is all that was left. It was individual people who died. Not just Americans, but people from all over the world in a display of terroism so atrocious it would have been inconcievable prior to 9/11. Terrorists targeted the abstract ideas that form the concept of "America" and all it stands for, but it was human beings who had to pay the price. The destruction of the twin towers does not represent a destruction of an American symbol, but of the death of human lives and futures and hopes and dreams. It represents not an "american loss" but a worldwide one; one that is felt by all of humanity regardless of nationality. So, that is why today seems like a sad day.