EDITORIAL — 9/11 22 years on

It has been 22 years the 9/11 terror attack. Perhaps the only terror attack ever to be seen live as it happened by the entire world minute by painful minute, from the first plane crashing into the first World Trade Center tower to the last standing tower collapsing into the earth.

Everyone knows what happened that day, everyone remembers what they were doing or where they were when they received the shocking news or watched the event unfold live. It has become a turning point in the lives many who tend to divide their existence into before 9/11 and after 9/11.

But 22 years since the day that changed the world, has much really changed in the world?

For a while there was actually a promise that 9/11 wouldn’t remain just a disaster, a tragedy, but become a rallying call to enforce change that will make the world better. As idealistic as it may sound, some people wanted it to be the last terrorist attack ever to be committed. Among others, not the least of all revenge, this was one reason that the War against Terror was launched.

Of course, reality is that the situation isn’t just black and white; it’s not just a simple matter of us versus them, Muslims versus Christians, autocracy versus democracy, or this versus that. Confronted with political realities that had been existing for decades but brought only to the attention of the world because of that one day, the War against Terror slowly lost steam and ground down to a halt.

And now we have the world we have today. Not much different from the time before 9/11.

Considering how some nations are still being allowed to bully others, how one nation openly wages war upon another under false pretenses, how one nation is allowed to develop weapons that threaten nearby countries, how a group of armed thugs pretending to be administrators was practically allowed to return to their former enclave, and how world powers continue to ignore nations in need or issues of utmost importance we start to wonder if the world has really changed since then.