For most Americans, this is a hard weekend. It’s hard not to remember where you were and what you were doing 10 years ago today. I live in DC proper now and those memories have sort of been thrust in our face by the news warning of things like increased suspicious activity (the bridge by my house that I walk over at least twice a day to get to and from the Metro to get to work was closed for a few hours on Friday due to a suspicious package) and heightened security warnings. It makes everything that happened 10 years ago feel that much more fresh. I’m not scared; I figure that we’re safer now than we have ever been and especially on this day, everyone is on high alert and everything will be just fine.

It’s amazing how fresh and raw the wounds that our country suffered a decade ago can feel. All week on the news, there’s been clips of that day. I vividly remember that day but now the footage and the pictures are starting to look old.

10 years ago, I was a Junior in high school. I was sitting in my AP U.S. History class. Little did we know how the course of history would be changing for our country at that very moment. I can remember the look on my teacher’s face. I remember his indecision on whether to keep changing or to go to another classroom to watch history changing (history being made won out). I grew up in a town less than 50 miles away from DC and it has an Army base and therefore I went to school with a lot of kids who had parents in the military and were down at the Pentagon a lot. It hit close to home.

I think about the way that things have changed in the past 10 years and it’s almost hard to remember how things were…