The terrible events of 9/11 changed the shape of politics, society, and way of thinking all over the world. In the space of a few hours, the world changed on us. I am currently living in Japan and I was ready to go to sleep after a long day at work (11:30). I got a phonecall from a friend of mine who told me, rather urgently, to turn the TV on. What I saw was smoke pouring out of one of the WTC towers. At first, I thought it was a highrise fire or something as something like that had happened in Moscow a few months earlier. I listened to the commentary on TV and could make out that a plane had crashed into the building. Just as it started entering my consciousness that it was indeed the World Trade Center that was belching smoke the second plane came flying onto the screen. I think part of my brain just shut off at that point. I was trying to convince myself that this wasn’t real. I mean, how does something like this happen? I read it in a book once (Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor) but this kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in real life. For the next half hour I just watched helplessly as people jumped from hundreds of meters up. Then the towers came down. Through the next few hours reports were coming in on a plane hitting the pentagon and one flight crashing in Pennsylvania. I couldn’t sleep for the next few nights as I tried to work out in my head why this happened and who would do something like that to their fellow man. This slowly turned into a rage. I don’t care how sacred you claim your jihad is. You don’t do something like this. Over the next few days Bush and many other politicians called this an act of war and as a “day of infamy” equal to Pearl Harbor. But wait…Pearl Harbor was the Japanese Navy attacking a US Navy installation. This is a group of zealots taking over a civilian plane and crashing it into a civilian building. This is alot worse than Pearl Harbor, and lets not give the terrorists the credit by calling this an act of war. This was just mass murder on a grand scale. They just killed unsuspecting, unarmed civilians. I hope they’re proud of themselves and the disservice they have done to their cause they claim to believe in.