SMAMS BLOG

I’ve been trying to avoid this but I hope the actions of today don’t bring out intolerable assholes who blame the majority for the actions of the few. I’ve had to deal with 9/11 for 13 years and I’m not even muslim or Arabic, so I can imagine how scared they are. We don’t know who did this and neither have you and if these attacks happened to be from a terrorist organization from the middle east, please do not throw your blame at us. We are as angry at them as you are and we don’t need to be twice as angry and twice as scared from those who did it and the fellow Americans we live with.

9/11 the view from a Indian NewYorker

I still remember that day and all the craziness it brought in my life.  It was the 3rd day of a new school, middle school and I just came into music class.  We were messing around and trying to figure out each other still while listening to hot 97 when the news came across the radio station.  At first my teacher though it was a joke and I really didn’t know much so I didn’t know anything they were talking about but after about ten minutes it came across the speakers and I saw my teacher break down in tears.  Many of the kids just sat around in awkwardness as we didn’t know each other or what was happening but we were suddenly told to evacuate to the auditorium as parents came to pick up their children.  When you went outside no one knew what was going on, many though it was a accident and all you saw for miles downtown was a huge dust blob which actually lasted for days.  For the whole day on every channel was disturbing pictures of the towers being demolished by two planes and the innocent people caught in them, you saw many jumping from the high floors but the worst news for me was watching people that closely resemble me dancing and singing because of our agony.  

The first couple of days the people of new york were in a constant state of shock but even more in depression as people did acts of kindness for each other, which isn’t really the new york way.  Any little thing to put a smile on their face they did as the toll of dead bodies was rising and the list of missing people was limitless.  As the days went by we as people became more aware of what happened and it was then when 9/11 became the start of a horrible couple of years were I constantly got into fights over actions that weren’t even my own.  What is worst is that I was from trinidad, was of Indian decent and was brought up as a christian and knew nothing about why these people committed these acts of inhumanity but I had to deal with their actions.

I literally felt like everything was taken from me, I got racially abused, physically attacked and the worst was not the fights but the time I went on a plane and saw the man sitting next to me in a constant fear that I was gonna hijack the plane.  He went and got plane captains and flight stewardess to run checks on me before we departed and it literally felt like a kick in a gut, to know that someone was that frighten of me in that way was horrifying and something I never wish for anyone to ever go threw.  

As the years passed and things got worsed I couldn’t help but to think about the real muslim americans and how much they must be suffering, every sept 11 that passed they would talk about how it effected the people in the 50 states but never about the actions the american people took out on these people.  The discrimination they had to face and the constant racial and religious profiling but yet the american public was happy to attack them because not only were they scared but they also needed someone to suffer for the actions of a few radical extremist.  

So more then anything I am happy that this year, ten years later when the american public has now got its revenge on the asshole that made us suffer that they are now talking about the views of muslim americans and how september 11 effected them.  Now for once they get to get their voices heard because like me, although we understand the reasons why Americans were so angry, It is still something we had to suffer twice as much.