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Thursday, 5-5-11
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Death of a terrorist,
justice for a nation
How
9/11
defined a generation
JEREMY BAUER-WOLF
Arts and Life Editor
Junior Corbin Mayo remembers the exact football game he watched Sept.
10, 2001: the New York Giants versus the Denver Broncos. He was 11 years
old at the time and couldn’t stay up with his father to watch the end.
But Mayo’s father, Robert, would always leave him little notes in the morn¬
ing telling him the score of the game or just telling him "good luck on your
test” or "I love you.” That morning was no different, other than that would
be the last note that Robert Mayo would ever write his son.
"I was in elementary school, and we didn’t really know what was going on
at the time," Mayo said. "But I heard a rumor ... that something had hap¬
pened to the World Trade Center and I freaked out like, ‘What’s going on?
My dad works there ... is he okay?' And when I came home, right in front
of my house, my mom was there on the stoop, just waiting for me to come
home. I asked my mom ‘Where’s dad?' and she said she didn’t know."
Local police came later to inform Mayo and his mother, Meryl, that offi¬
cials had recovered the body of Robert Mayo.
"He was in really bad shape, they didn’t want to even show my mom,"
Mayo said. "He was really battered and burnt up."
Mayo said he felt he lost years of his education and suffered from depres¬
sion through most of high school.
"It defined my childhood," he said. “I went through therapy and relied a
lot on my friends for support. It wasn’t until about junior year of high school
that I felt I was strong enough to deal with everything and saw the light.”
Now, 10 years later, after the death of Osama bin Laden, Mayo said he
finally feels his father’s killer was brought to justice.
“Pve wanted him to die since I was 11,” Mayo said. “I finally got that
closure."
Stories of victims like Mayo, the attacks, the heartbreak, and finally the
death of bin Laden, have left an indelible mark of fear on our culture, accord¬
ing to English lecturer Carol Quinn, who specializes in world folklore and
cultural trends.
"You see rhetorically throughout a lot of the past decade, in a political
sense, a lot of arguments that were founded on little more than fear," Quinn
said. “That was a definite trend during the past decade. There are fallacies
like a ‘slippery slope argument,’ meaning ‘If you vote for my opponent, it
will lead to some sort of disaster. If you vote for my opponent, there will be
a nuclear attack on America' because we were made so suddenly vulnerable."
In her world folklore courses, Quinn discusses the presence of myths that
have spawned from
9/11.
“I predict that fewer people will think it was a conspiracy theory," she
said. "For whatever reason, people like closure, and we didn’t have closure
and it was easier to come up with a conspiracy theory because people wanted
closure. Now that bin Laden is dead, it gives us a kind of closure. Hopefully,
people will be able to move away from that fear.”
But it will be difficult, considering how much
9/11
has shaped our culture,
Quinn said.
"The specter of being on a plane, calling your loved ones to say goodbye,
motivated a lot of people to get their first phone," she said. "Before
9/11,
we
were a lot more isolated. It was okay to have an answering machine ... after
that, you had to have a cell phone, driven by fear that a terrorist attack could
come at any time and you might be cut off."
Freshman political science major Ryan Fredriksson said that while disas¬
trous,
9/11
brought the country closer together.
"I never really understood the meaning of what America is. [I thought]
that it’s just a country, we just live here," he said. "After
9/11,
1 understood
See
9/11,
page 18
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