One day, many years from now, people will ask me, “What do you remember about Sept. 11?” I will give them the standard answer: I was emerging wet from the shower at my first apartment, favorite blue towel wrapped around my body, when my roommate Sheila told me something was happening in New York.

That’s it. That’s all I remember about the day except that I had a chocolate chip granola bar for breakfast (I ate one for breakfast every day that semester) and my roommate and I took a new route to school that day, commenting on how Eau Claire was probably the safest place one could be at the moment. The only thing I noticed about the day was how quiet it was on the streets and in the lobbies of the academic halls.

When they ask, I might also tell them how the events angered me. They made me angry not because thousands of innocent people died or because some buildings were destroyed, but because it seemed as though the entire American population was making the infamous events out to be the greatest travesty to ever occur in the world.

Maybe it was. But it upset me that nobody considered the fact that if this was the worst set of circumstances the United States has had to deal with in recent years, we are pretty damn fortunate.

We should be grateful our country isn’t among the many that have to deal with debilitating conflict daily. Above all, it embarrassed me that the country’s sentiment seemed to be so immediately focused on retaliation, despite that the “enemy” had yet to be named. To this day, it annoys me that every media outlet is referring to the events as a “tragedy that touched the entire nation.” It didn’t touch me. Not much, anyway.

So on the Friday following Sept. 11, while everyone I knew was attending a prayer vigil or memorial service, I went to Oakwood Mall. There weren’t any spectacular sales going on that day, but I did have a $15 gift certificate for Express that was about to expire.

I didn’t tell my roommates where I was going. One of them had asked if I wanted to attend a service at the Methodist Church on Lake Street, but for one, it had already started, and two, the idea of it made me feel a little hypocritical. My overall sentiment of the events, then and now, include the unpopular phrases, “Quit your whining,” and “It happened, now get over it.” The shopping center was nearly deserted that day and for a brief moment I felt a little embarrassed being there, but my red tank top is still one of my favorite shirts.

Perhaps others will be compelled to classify me as a typically self-absorbed American or cold-hearted, which is fine. One of the beauties of America is our freedom of speech, right? Or maybe someone out there will surprise me and agree with my mom, who sent me a post-Sept. 11 letter calling me “an insightful young woman.’

Either way, when people ask me how I was affected by the terrorist attacks, I might feel the urge to be perfectly honest with them, whether they want to hear it.

I will say how I was relatively unaffected by the events on a personal level, except that they merely served to perpetuate my disappointment in the ethnocentric mentality of the United States of America. This rang true especially when I heard about many people’s reactions to the events, including violence and discrimination toward those of Middle-Eastern heritage and an obsession with garnering pity the world over.

Isn’t this nation supposedly the richest in the world, in more than one aspect? How much pity do we really deserve?

I’ll probably mention how I didn’t know any of the victims, but my cousin Josh had to quit school at UW-Oshkosh because he was called into duty for the Air National Guard. He spent that semester fixing airplane engines at a base in Madison and using his military ID to purchase beer from the store there. Apparently they sell to underagers in uniform. My friend Paige was in the National Guard. She had to spend a couple of weeks in Puerto Rico. She brought back some great rum.

I am not dismissing the events of Sept. 11, nor am I trying to make light of them. It happened once and it might very well happen again. It’s time we all moved on. And perhaps I am being a bit naive or idealistic, but maybe our great nation should concentrate on why the attacks occurred and how to right those wrongs rather than continue to drop bombs into the middle of a crowd.

Katie Couric said the events on Sept. 11 “robbed America of its innocence.” But was America ever really that innocent? Woody Harrelson said, “The war on terrorism is a form of terrorism.”

That statement makes sense to me.