By Seth Freedland
Town Crier Editorial Intern
For a nation of adults growing content with being the last superpower left in the world, 9/11 was a chilling reminder of past international conflict. For the American youth, however, it brought the realization that an entire generation’s future had been transformed.
Like millions of other students across the country, Alex Roome was just beginning college when the terrorist attacks occurred. His school, University of California at Santa Cruz, responded like nearly every other university did around the nation.
“We were just getting settled in when it happened,” Roome recalled. “I was meeting people and having a blast in my first week of college. Then, suddenly, I was attending candlelight vigils. It was like someone let all the air out of the campus.”
Roome, a Mountain View resident, said that many of his new friends went to counseling sessions to work out the grief associated with the attacks. But that sense of hurt quickly transformed into anger, he said.
“After the initial shock and fear died down, the debating and discussing on how the government was dealing with the situation began,” Roome said. “People stopped being sad and became angry with the way (the United States) responded. Some students still feel lost with their emotions … but most are using activism to get out the fury of what happened.”
Marc Grinberg, a Princeton University sophomore, noted this activism has already changed the nation’s youth.
“We’ve been called a lot of things,” he said. “I’ve heard Generation Y, Generation MTV, Generation Dot Com. Now, all of a sudden, we’re Generation 9/11.”
Grinberg agreed with the new name, believing it points to “the one thing that all young people are beginning to rally around.”
“By living in a time of both peace and huge economic prosperity, we’ve been tagged as spoiled and unmotivated,” he said. “9/ll has united a very splintered generation much the way I believe previous wars have united lost generations.”
The historical event most compared to 9/11 is the attack on Pearl Harbor, a fact not lost on the nation’s youth. High school history and civics classes across the country read Tom Brokaw’s book on the young people who fought and lived through World War II, calling them “The Greatest Generation.”
Erica Palay, a student at University of California at Los Angeles, said that 9/11 has given her generation its chance to rise above the fear and the anger and be the next “greatest generation.”
“Older generations pinned us as not having direction,” she said. “We haven’t had to struggle for our freedoms. We’ve gained it without truly working for it. Without 9/11, I think our generation would have found our own cause - with it, however, a cause has been assigned for us to take on.”
