On Sept. 11, I was both mentally and physically as distanced from Ground Zero as was possible in the continental United States. I lived on the West Coast in a quiet seaside town, and as a recent emigre from South Korea, I had no pre-existing knowledge of the World Trade Center, al Qaeda or Islam. My mother woke me up, urging me to watch the news. I stared at the screen and went back to sleep for a few more minutes before preparing for school. During recess, my schoolmates chattered excitedly, filled with speculation and innocent curiosity. Blame our suburban isolation or our youthful naivete, but I don't think any of us in that playground grasped the gravity of the situation, or what we would face thereafter.
A decade later, we have lived nearly half of our lives in the shadow of Sept. 11, bearing witness to America's pain, fury, aggression and regret. We grew up seeing the best of America turn into its worst, as our initial solidarity in the face of the attacks was twisted into a cascade of fear fear of terrorism in the abstract, fear of future attacks, fear of baseless nuclear threats, fear of Middle Eastern regimes and, soon enough, fear of each other. Sept. 11 left an indelible gash in our national psyche our generation spent some of its most formative years watching the adults struggling to deal with one of our most troubled decades in recent memory.
Now, we can no longer claim innocence as naive witnesses. Following the assassination of Osama bin Laden, many of us gathered together and erupted in euphoria. I fear that this celebration even for the death of a man as reviled as bin Laden may foreshadow our gradual internalization of the same hatred and fear that has led older generations astray.
This trend is worrisome, as ours will be one of the first generations tasked with carrying on the burdens and atoning for the sins of the past decade. We will be the ones called to pay the bulk of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now totaling over $1.25 trillion. We will be expected to balance our precarious relationship with the Muslim world. And while the United States' "proper" role in both Iraq and Afghanistan remains hotly debated, we will also be called to focus on difficult tasks within our own borders.
Much of the work ahead of us is easy to define, yet it remains woefully formidable: revitalizing the economy, paying our debts and trying to regain a sense of pride in American solidarity. However, there is one step that we cannot forgo in this process. In our counterstrike against Muslim extremists, we have willingly and wrongfully besmirched our own Muslim communities. In a recent survey released by the Pew Research Center, almost 43 percent of Muslims who were contacted reported that they had personally experienced harassment in the past year, which demonstrated "a lingering sentiment of being besieged by growing anti-Muslim sentiment," according to Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
If Americans continue to demonize an entire religion one composed of numerous denominations and variations, much like Christianity for the actions of a limited number of extremists, they risk alienating those who have done no wrong and undermining our already tenuous moral standing.
Our generation will soon be called upon to bear the mantle of leadership, and we must be prepared to move the United States beyond its fears while still remembering the tragedy of the Sept. 11 attacks. We can no longer allow abstract fear to fool us into destructive and rash decisions, nor can we allow prejudices to marginalize any group of people.
