My experience surrounding these events likely mirrors that of millions of youths across the United States and the rest of the world: I was in school, unassuming of anything happening even outside my classroom, let alone something of this magnitude; I talked with my friends about video games and cartoons, lamented long division and increased homework, and was relishing the final days of summer. Then my teacher changed the channel to CNN, and I got my first glimpse of the horrors that befell New York that day. The towers billowing smoke and flame, the people on the ground screaming as they ran for their lives. Up until then, I thought something like this to be inconceivable, the stuff of big-budget action movies, but the effect it had on this country and the destruction and death it brought about were all too real. I and the millions of other youths like me lost their innocence that day, but more importantly than that, nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives. Three-thousand people that believed, as I did, that this was a day like any other.