September, 2001: Today’s Saint Louis University undergraduates had just brushed the cusp of adolescence. We were 11, 12, 13 and14 years old. We loitered in middle schools and high schools, passing through lunch lines and gym classes and school dances on our way to the grown-up world.
And then, on Sept. 11, we sat rapt in mid-morning classes and watched that world, as we knew it, burn down.
Seven years have passed since that fateful Tuesday. For seven years, we’ve matured into the America of a new millennium; seven years, we’ve waded through the political and cultural ripples caused by that tragedy, now buried firm in history’s sediment.
We’ve digested Sept.11 and absorbed it into our world view. It is packed into our definition of America. It is inside of us.
We are the post-9-11 generation.
After the United States emerged as a superpower in the 1940s, Americans lived on top of the world. America was the best, the biggest, the smartest, the richest. America was undisputable, invincible.
Our generation was reared in a Pax Americana.
Now, we have to take responsibility for a new world, one with an atrophied dollar and an exported work force. We must assume $3.50-per-gallon gasoline, foreclosed houses and five-figure student loans. We must embrace globalization and inherit an ideological war we started five years ago, one we dare not lose but cannot decisively win.
This is our world. This is the stage we were destined to play upon. We’re here in limbo between two turning points, waiting for unity or ruin-or a little bit of both.
The youth of America comes of age politically by casting ballots this November, and the frame of mind we take with us into the voting booth is one necessarily more aware of its neighbors across the globe. We’ve ceased to be mere observers. We are now actors in our communities and our own lives. We are conscious, we are worldwide, we are slightly vulnerable and we know a little about the taste of mortality.
Somewhere, in the back of our collective mind, a 13-year-old version of us watches now, thinking, “I’ll be a grown-up in this brave new world.”
Thriving here and now won’t be easy, but it won’t be impossible. Wait it out. Our perspective will grow as Sept. 11, 2001, drifts on into the fog of the past, as we guide our ship of state through the diminishing vibrations of that day’s wake.
Our choices, like all choices, carry bits of hope within them. Each decision can move us closer to the ideal we strive to touch. So choose, young men and women, and choose well. Tomorrow belongs to us.
