I turned 25 just over two weeks ago. Around the time of your birthday, people (usually those older than you) like to ask you if you feel any older. This year was one of the first times I could honestly say, yes, I feel older. I’m not sure what it is. I just see the world differently. Things aren’t so black and white anymore. Everything’s gray. Things that seemed important, aren’t. Things you never thought you’d care about, you do.

I was deeply reminded of this watching TV tonight. CBS was doing their tribute to 9/11, with a 60 Minutes episode all about the attacks, followed by the 9/11 documentary made by the two French brothers who just happened to be making a documentary about a NYC firehouse when the World Trade Centers were hit. I never watched the documentary when it originally aired. Like most people, I was glued to the TV after the planes hit. After days of constant exposure I was sick of it. It made me nauseous.

I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard the news. It’s funny, everyone always plays that game, the game where you ask questions like: “Where were you when you heard that JFK was shot?” 9/11 is the first and I think only event in my life like that where I can honestly remember everything about that day. I had just gotten up sometime after nine and lazily rolled out of bed, knowing that I didn’t have to go to class until 1 that afternoon. My morning rituals usually consisted of aimlessly surfing the internet and eating. Then Charlotte came, slamming her fist against my door before just letting herself in. I thought she just had another wasp in her room and wanted me to kill it. Instead she seemed almost insulted that I didn’t know what was going on in the world. Sorry, I don’t usually start my day off by watching Fox morning programming.

She told me that planes had flow into both Towers and the Pentagon. As I was still waking up it took me a while to process this information. I remembered the last time terrorists tried to bomb the World Trade Center and just assumed that this was like that. It was the whole Pentagon thing that troubled me. What did that mean? While I recognized that this was obviously a tragedy, the scope of it didn’t really make an impact on me. It wasn’t until Charlotte practically dragged me back to her room to watch the live coverage and I actually saw the footage that things first started to sink in. Tower Two was already down. And then, not minutes after I started watching, Tower One fell right before my eyes. That scared me.

I watched TV all day until around maybe nine that night when I felt like puking and decided to turn it off. Of course they kept looping the footage for days. Watching this documentary tonight brought all of that back to me, but from a completely different perspective. Watching that I realized how much different I am from that guy in 2001. The world has changed. I have changed.

I find that I’m a lot less religiously minded than I once was. I used to think that I could find a common denominator in all the different religions that could bring us all back together. But all I see is more people killing other people in the name of religion. I went to church every Sunday as a kid. Why don’t I remember the “killing is OK” part? I try to think of religion a lot less lately. I’m angry, like I think God must be angry if he is out there looking down at us. If he really spoke to people thousands of years ago, do you think that this is what he had in mind? I think that if I were him and looked back on what I started, I probably would have kept my mouth shut. More and more Atheism looks less like a weak man’s way out, and more like a better solution. Those who deny evolution are denying one very important fact: that we are all still animals, most, if not all of the time. And those who deny evolution are the biggest animals of us all.

I’m just now reminded of the book Animal Farm. There’s a slogan in that book everyone remembers after reading it that was meant to describe Communism but can just as easily describe Religion. Hell, screw labels. It describes the human condition.

“All animals are created equal. Some are just more equal than others.”

I think I’m paraphrasing a bit, but you all get the idea.

[I was going to end my post there.  Looking back at it though, I found my insights at the end, how do we say?  Ah yes: A tad bit negative.  Instead I’d like to end it how Andy Rooney ended his segment tonight: “As Americans, instead of trying harder and harder to protect ourselves from outside threats, maybe we should instead take a minute to try and think why it is that so many people hate us so much.”]