I wasn't going to write a memorial like everyone else on the planet, but i did anyway.

I remember watching the coverage on CNN international back in Zimbabwe. The whole country was ablaze with horror and disbelief. My friends and I didn’t really believe it, it was surreal and seemed like some off colour joke. But it was on every news station in the world and everyone was talking about it. I didn’t feel much of anything at the time. I felt so detached. I thought, “I’m not American, this doesn’t really concern me.”

I realize how harsh and maybe even ignorant that sounds coming from a well-traveled member of the proverbial global village but my reasoning was that terrorism was a global plague that had affected just about everyone BUT the United States up until now. And yet, once America got hit, everyone was supposed to fall over themselves in grief. I was angry.

I didn’t understand how when embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed and both Americans and Africans die in the tragedy, no one really spent two minutes on it. When thousands of innocents were being murdered in ethnic cleansing and mass genocide was taking place in poor countries, people tusk tusked but were quick to move on to more important things. But let America the Almighty get hit and the whole world was expected to shatter lest you be regarded a terrorist.

I thought felt the pain that Americans felt. I really did. The attacks were inhumane and evil. But there was a bitterness I felt that though it was a grave tragedy that needed attention and though those were innocent lives lost needlessly, that somehow the world was regarding this tragedy more important than any other tragedy in the world simply because it was America.

I can not say I was justified in my anger, afterall I was bitter. I did not hate America by any means or wish harm to her people. I was just bitter. But it has taken me five years to come to a turning point in my thinking. After watching the fifth anniversary video, I think I momentarily felt the Armageddon-sized horror people in this country felt the day it happened. In my mind the past five years, I have done everything I can possibly do to challenge what I thought was blind allegiance of most of the world to America. I wanted to prove everyone wrong.

I wanted to show that America brought this on itself. Not in any malicious way, but just to bring what I felt was perspective to this event. Why would someone hate a nation so much that they would take their own life, not to mention the lives of many others, to make their voice heard? Could that really be nonchalantly written off as insanity and an evil religion? Or was there one grain of justification to it all?

Was America to blame for this tragedy? Did this government kill in own people in the name of pushing forward its own agenda? I am not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but I wanted people to consider that perhaps these individuals who undertook this mission to destroy and utterly devastate had felt that America had so viciously destroyed and devastated their own hopes and dreams to the point where they wanted to hurt America as badly as they felt they had been hurt, even if it meant them dying in the process.

I was so busy being annoyed at Americans pointing fingers and effectively isolating anyone who wasn’t committed to their cause that I didn’t have time to notice I was becoming the other extreme, pointing my own fingers. I missed the point by a long shot. It wasn’t about whose nation is bigger and gets more coverage. It wasn’t about the sudden bubble of patriotism that sprang up and around the U.S. and inadvertently isolated the rest of us. It was not about deserving or not deserving a taste of your own medicine or even a taste of the medicine many other nations had been force-fed for centuries.

It wasn’t about Americans not wanting to include the rest of us in their grief because they were too worried “we” would attack them once again, the collective rest of the world that is. They fingerprinted and took my picture at the airport. I was randomly searched and interrogated by airport officials who didn’t understand that I was coming out of Iran because my family HAD to live there and that I was just trying to get an education. I don’t blame them, it was a rough time. But my focus was inward, how this is about me and affects me as a non-American. It wasn’t about any of that.

It was about the humanity of life. Children who didn’t even fully understand right from wrong had their lives involuntarily sacrificed to some inhumane god named Terror. Men and women who didn’t get a chance to tell their loved ones “ You know, I really do love you and hope we never fight again,” were cheated out of a second chance. Loved ones waiting at the airport with flowers and big “Welcome Home” balloons were left stunned and deflated. Someone interviewing for a job at the World Trade Center that morning wasn’t even given a chance. A firefighter doing the right thing and trying to help was left wondering why bad things happen to good people as his life dissolved before his weeping eyes.

I can fight and argue with you all day about the unfairness of the hierarchy of world politics and journalism. I can name ten other global terror attacks before Sept. 11 that came and went without the majority of Americans even hearing about them. I can debate with you and debate with you. But is one person’s life more important than another’s just because of where they are from? Did all these people die in vain? I hope to God they didn’t. Sept. 11 is a time to remember life. And truly a time where patriotism has to be a global reaching effort, not isolated to individual nations and regions. We have to be proud of the world we live in because no matter where we are from, we are still citizens of the world.