I moved to the US in August of 2001 for graduate school at Cornell.<\/p>\n
On a sunny Tuesday morning a few weeks later, after a hike up Cascadilla Gorge to get to campus from our house in downtown Ithaca, my roommate and I were told that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, we heard about the second plane.<\/p>\n
In what was perhaps a moment of typical Canadian na\u00efvet\u00e9, my first thought was: “What are the odds of two planes hitting the same building on the same morning?”<\/p>\n
But it didn’t take long\u00a0to realize what had happened. I remember going to class — Econ 609 – Microeconomic Theory I with David Easley — in a daze that afternoon. I also remember waking up every morning for about a month only to have to realize all over again that this was not just a dream, kind of like how I had felt in the past after the death of close relatives or bad breakups.<\/p>\n
As such, 9\/11 pretty much set the tone for my life in the US.<\/p>\n
After ten years, the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks that deprived so many of my fellow Cornell students from their loved ones \u00a0has finally been killed<\/a> by a team of Navy SEALs working under the supervision of the Joint Special Operations Command. Both the New Yorker<\/a><\/em> and the Atlantic<\/a><\/em> have excellent analyses. And here is the President’s speech last night:<\/p>\n