Reflections on the ten-year anniversary of September 11,2001, part 1

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing that day. I was in high school, freshman year. As soon as I found out what had happened, I immediately worried about my father. I found out later that day that he had managed to catch one of the last flights out of New York City hours before the attacks happened, and was back at home, but I was still shaken for long thereafter. I don't think any of us have ever fully recovered from what happened on September 11, 2001. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, this country went through some of the important changes in it's history. On this, the ten-year anniversary on the 9/11 attacks, it's important to reflect on everything that's happened in the past decade and ask: What have we learned? Have we learned the right lessons? Looking back, i can't truly say that we have learned anything at all. At that time in my life, I didn't know anything about the Middle East, about Islam, about U.S. foreign policy, or about world history. Very little to nothing of substance related to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  I always had an interest in history, literature, American political affairs, and in taking high school journalism classes, interests that began to develop two years earlier in junior high. (Notice that when I refer to "political affairs", it's not the same as "politics" or anything "political". I have come to absolutely hate those two words, after hearing countless people in my life use them to describe anything even vaguely more enlightening, serious-minded, or intellectual than this happy-go-lucky culture of willful ignorance we live this. This is not to be so arrogant as to say I'm more enlightened, serious-minded, or intellectual than anyone else, it's simply frustrating to bring up certain topics in conservation, only to hear people dismiss it as something "political", even if it isn't. )