Anniversary of a changed world

A year ago today, I found myself at Ground Zero at 8:45 a.m. My friends and I had driven into New York City at the start of our sophomore year at Princeton. The city, divided over everything from how to distribute funds to victims to what design should replace the twin towers, seemed to come together in Lower Manhattan that morning. Throngs of people stood next to one another, packed shoulder to shoulder for blocks, as the name of each victim was read aloud from a platform high above the pits where two skyscrapers had once been anchored. Some of the names I knew — a friend of my parents, the father of a high school classmate. The dignitaries, politicians, and victims' family members took turns reading the list, working their way through the alphabet. In a city where it seems no one ever stops moving, thousands of people stood still.

It is the second anniversary of September 11th, and though countless memorials and retrospectives will be written today, there is simply no other story to tell. My classmates and I were freshman on that fateful day two years ago. At a time when, simply by virtue of growing up, everything in our lives was radically changing, we found the world in flux as well. We watched news reports and casualty updates with total strangers and went to memorial services and discussion forums on a campus we needed a map to navigate. Today, those strangers are my best friends and this campus is my home. As for most Americans, what was strange and frightening has become every day. The world has changed.

Our generation was uniquely affected by the events of September 11th. We learned that nothing is for certain, that everything can change in an instant. Just embarking on lives of our own, most of us had not yet experienced the deaths of loved ones, broken hearts and disappointments life serves up to teach us to appreciate each day, to know that we can only live this moment to its fullest and never know for sure what will come next.

Recently, I was sitting around a dinner table with two of my closest friends, the kind of people I came to Princeton to meet, discussing the future as only three twenty year olds can. We talked about relationships, marriage, children, graduate school, promotions, partnerships and political office. We talked about our friends, our families, our classmates and our country. We began to realize that we had no idea what we were talking about. We could not predict what we would be doing in ten years or in two. We could not know what the world would be like when it came time for us to make our choices.

In a summer in which my friends and I found jobs, lived on our own and made our way in a world outside of Princeton, the changing times in which we live were readily apparent. Our country continued a war on terrorists we cannot find. We lost more soldiers to maintaining the peace than we had in fighting the war that preceded it. We saw affirmative action questioned by the Supreme Court, legal victories for gays offset by discussion of a discriminatory Constitutional amendment and Americans accustomed to high stock prices and burgeoning bank accounts discovering that an economic slump does not have to be temporary. Even those running the country — from Democrats who carp unconstructively at President Bush about the war in Iraq to Republicans who miss the boat on treating minorities, homosexuals and women like equals — seemed to be struggling to catch up.

Today is the second anniversary of September 11th and the first day of classes. It is a day for remembering what has come before, for thinking of the tragedy and the hope that came after it. It is also a day of beginnings for all of us at Princeton. Looking forward, as young citizens of a young nation, we do not know what lies ahead. We cannot know. We can only hope, and work and fight, for the best, for ourselves and for our country. This will best honor the lives, and the innocence, lost on September 11th. This will give us the best foundation from which to shape our lives and our nation.

Katherine Reilly is a Wilson School major from Short Hills, N.J.