15 years

© Simon Poulter 2016

15 years. 15 years ago since our world changed forever. 15 years since four planes caused the deaths of 2,977 innocent people. 15 years since the world descended into a seemingly perpetual state of war in and with the Middle East. 15 years since our travel liberties were curtailed. 15 years since we were, as a society, rendered anxious by threat, suspicion and anger.

There were acts of terror and mass murder in the name of ideology before 9/11. There have been such acts since, and sadly, there will be more in the future. London, Paris, Madrid, Bali, Istanbul, Brussels, and Baghdad, Kabul, Mosul and plenty of others on a pretty much daily basis.

You can't and you shouldn't judge the magnitude of 9/11 in comparison with other attacks. But 9/11 was and still is, 15 years on, a day and an act of such singular brutality, of murder on a scale that even now seems hard to fully appreciate. But we will have to, as, today, once more, we again see the footage of the Twin Towers coming down; pictures of United Airlines flight 175 slamming into the South Tower of New York's World Trade Center between floors 77 and 85 at 9.03am, 17 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into floors 93 to 99 of the North Tower; of the aftermath at the Pentagon after American Airlines flight 77 had smashed into it like a guided missile; and of the words "roll it" as passengers bravely attempted to seize back control of United Airlines flight 93 before it crashed into field in empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

We will see and hear these visceral reminders of that sunny September day in 2001 and we will reflect, I hope, on the evil minds that dreamed up the "planes operation", and the 19 who carried it out, whose ideals deemed it necessary to murder almost 3000 people who were just doing their jobs - travelling for business, working at their desks, responding to an emergency.

I've blogged before about my own experiences that Tuesday, of the helplessness of watching events unfold early in the morning as I was waking in California. I won't retread old ground, save to say that 9/11 haunts me still. Many have said it was "their JFK". Others, of my parents' generation, have said that, while awful, 9/11 fails to compare to living through a world war, and I can see that. But that doesn't ease the discomfort of knowing that the families of 1,113 of the 2,753 who died at the World Trade Center still have no biological confirmation of their relatives' deaths. Or that 33,000 who were around New York that morning are being treated currently for serious illnesses and cancers linked to the attacks (in fact, US government figures show that there are nearly 75,000 people being monitored for 9/11-linked illnesses). For them, there is no closure, no talk of the 9/11 legacy, no complaints about removing belts and shoes and liquids at security checks, and certainly no remorse about the death of 9/11's chief architect.

Over the last five years I've visited New York and its New Jersey hinterland regularly for work. Every time I've flown in to JFK or Newark airports, and have seen Lower Manhattan, I've been reminded of 9/11, but not just of the act itself, but of the impact it had on the greater New York area. Driving through the small communities of rural New Jersey, you will still occasionally see a yellow ribbon commemorating a fireman, a police officer or a medic who lost their lives that day, 15 years ago. And behind many front doors live those who lived through the event, only to be scarred for life, mentally, as well as physically. Again, just for going to work one sunny Tuesday morning. Astonishing heroes, all of them.

Today's anniversary will inevitably come with questioning as to why we put ourselves through this pain every year. It's no different, however, from commemorating the Somme or D-Day or any other such pivotal event in history. And it's not about lessons learned, either. America learned from 9/11, as the 567 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report outlined. The world learned not to take aviation security for granted ever again. But those are things that get fixed, after the fact.

In a recent op-ed for USA Today, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, respectively chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, wrote that since 9/11, global terrorism has "intensified", citing the Global Terrorism Index, to reveal that terrorist activity reached its highest recorded level in 2014, the last year with available data, with 32,685 terrorist-caused deaths. In 2001, that number didn't go higher than 5,000.

"Our focus cannot solely be on our own homeland," Kean and Hamilton wrote. "Terrorism might not pose an existential challenge to the United States, but it is a spreading disease eating away at the foundation of the free, open and lawful international system and the alliances that the US depends on for its prosperity and security."

"That day changed all of us. It changed America. And it changed the world." So said, recently to NBC News, Andrew Card, George W. Bush's chief of staff who infamously interrupted the president during a September 11, 2001 visit to a Florida infants school to whisper: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."

15 years ago today, America was under attack, but so was the rest of the world. And still is - and will continue to be all the time ideological hatred is allowed to manifest. Wherever it manifests itself.