A day ago, tennis player Emma Raducanu reached the US Open final: she became the first British female player who made it in 44 years. With her adorable smile, Emma is sunshine. Also, she was born in 2002, and this tiny fact of her biography suddenly got me. She was born a year after the 9/11 attacks, when, as they say, the world changed forever.
It’s very strange to think that it’s been 20 years already and a whole new generation has grown up and become young adults. They face a world that disproved many of the predictions of Fukuyama about “the end of history,” like, for example, the following fragment:
“But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom […]”.
As the historic Leviathan showed on that day, filling up the world with liberalism and democracy was not a straightforward task: on September 11 there was a feeling that the whole of Western civilisation could be disintegrated and ruined. The terror of that day was unfathomable. The pain and despair was unbelievable.
Yet it did not happen. The West as the Hegelian idea of cultural progression and a manifestation of the reciprocal and equal agreement among citizens to mutually recognise each other, survived, albeit deeply wounded.
While watching a brilliant documentary about 9/11 from National Geographic, a careful yet heartbreaking chronology of the unfolding events of that excruciatingly tragic day, I couldn’t help myself thinking that all those people—who appeared to find themselves at the forefront of the attacks, who survived (all of them miraculously)—were people who, once realising that they were still alive, started helping others immediately. Their courage, bravery and integrity were immense: they are true heroes who give us all hope, no matter how minuscule it is, that we will persevere.
May all those who perished rest in peace. May we all—those who survived and those who were petrified and shocked—find peace. And never forget.
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