Isabel Friedman | Generational soul searching

I was in my sixth grade social studies class decorating the front of a new composition notebook when my teacher told me that something terrible happened.

She turned on the classroom television and we watched a plane crash into the south tower.

It doesn’t take much for any of us to recall that exact moment of the attacks, when our lives — and the whole world — changed forever.

We came home early from school to sobbing parents and endless reruns of buildings collapsing and mangled wreckage.

Read more in the series »

Urgent phone calls were made to find out if, which or how many loved ones had died.

The nation became enveloped by unprecedented fear, confusion, vulnerability and anger.

And then an ironic sense of American unity (and flags) emerged that both brought us closer together and drove us apart from those who didn’t look like us.

A kind of selective nationalism, if you will, motivated by fear, ignorance and an irreconcilable sense of despair.

It didn’t matter how young we were or how little we could comprehend — what we did understand was that our realities had been broken and replaced by something far more dark and complex.

The following 10 years would follow a similar pattern — what we thought to be true would be turned on its head.

The last decade of our lives has been marked by volatile global politics that have engendered in us distrust of authority at home and abroad It colored our childhood and, whether we liked it or not, we became the “9/11 generation.”

But for a moment let’s put the political world aside to do some generational soul searching..

What kind of effect did watching an ever-complicated unfolding political climate have on our nine-, 10- and 11-year-old minds?

How did bearing witness to such profound tragedy and international unrest during the most formative years of our lives shape the way we view our place in the world?

Every generation has its defining historical moment, so how has ours defined us?

We’ve become a generation of slightly cynical skeptics with a penchant for digging for the truth.

We’ve been misled and disappointed too many times to buy what’s given to us at face value and have grown accustomed to look for truth in what’s not being said.

With a sharper eye for complex problems, we ask tough questions to get to the bottom line, even if it means discovering there’s more than one truth out there.

We’re guarded optimists with a humble sense of global responsibility.

We grew up with the Middle East in our living rooms, opening up a whole world of political, social and cultural issues for us to grapple with.

And while our eyes opened up to issues other than our own, we became more aware — and more critical — of our own country’s role in the international community. We also learned that our most trusted leaders could be wrong and that there are problems that are not ours to solve.

But now that we’ve traded up our glue sticks for college textbooks and kissed our adolescence goodbye, it’s only up to us to choose what emotions we’ll let guide the qualities we’ve inherited as “generation 9/11” — be they disillusionment, justice, nationalism, revenge or empathy, just to name a few.

We may prefer cautious pragmatism to idealism, but I like to think that we’re still motivated to make the world a better, safer place than the one we grew up in, even if it’s on a smaller, humbler scale.

Isabel Friedman, a College junior, is the president of the Penn Democrats. Her email address is isabelfr@sas.upenn.edu.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.