It would be remiss of me to claim that I speak on behalf of the Viral Generation, if I didn’t address my views on what many believe was the defining tragedy of our generation, 9/11.
I turned 18 on September 3rd, 2001, a few weeks after I began my disastrous foray into being a legitimate college student at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. To have an idea of what was happening in my life before 9/11, I’ll try to take you back to that particularly wonderful summer. Oh wait, no, if memory serves me correctly, everything still sucked back then. I was broke, like everyone else I knew, so that hasn’t changed. I was working a job that I was being paid way too much for the amount of skill and effort I put into it. The skill has changed, but honestly the effort hasn’t.
Really, the only difference in the interviening nine years, is that now I’ve gone through the things that you don’t realize are ahead of you as a teenager: homelessness, being robbed, mild drug abuse, a failed marriage, to name a few. The one thing I do certainly know, is that 9/11 has had very little impact on my life. It definately was not the defining moment of my existence, and I’m sorry President Obama, I respect you for much of what you say, and often how you say it, but it was not the “the seminal tragedy of this generation.” It probably should have been. It definitely impacted some of us, as we spent eight years fighting a war that we didn’t really believe in, but that war was a campaign promise from President Chimp. We would have been there anyway.
No, I was sitting in my College English when the World Trade Center was struck the first time. I wasn’t even aware that it had happened until I walked into the student union to get some breakfast and play in the computer lab. Everyone was gathered around the big screen TV, and I got there just in time to watch the second plane hit. It was a shocking image, I believe I wrote in my livejournal about it. It didn’t really stay with me.
It might seem a bit jaded to people not my age, but 9/11 didn’t mean anything to us. Most of us felt like it was an excuse to go to war more than anything else. If you ask any given member of the Viral Generation what the biggest tragedy in their life was, they’d probably tell you it was when Facebook went down for 5 hours the other day, or when they couldn’t buy a new pair of Chuck Taylors with their pizza delivery money.
Probably the biggest tragedy about it, was that we don’t really care.