It's 10 years today since that evening watching the West Wing in Abbotsford, the sofabed folded out so we could cosy up under the doona, when we went to the loo during an ad break and came back and on the show some crazy hijacker had flown a plane into the World Trade Centre tower... only then we realised the newsreader had an Australian accent and it was Channel 9 news. And it was real.
You were frantic trying to call your parents but the lines were jam packed and it was maybe 4 in the morning before you could get through. And it was, I sometimes think, the beginning of the end for you.
I will never really know what it was like growing up in Finland during the 70s and 80s. I still marvel at the awareness you seemed to have even as a little kid of being from a 'western' country growing up just over the fence from the 'eastern' superpower, with about 30 minutes to live if ever Ronald Regan or any other jerk politician decided to press the button. (After accidentally ending up on the wrong side in WWII, purely because the Germans were the only ones would help to keep the Russians out, the poor old Finns must've wondered what they'd ever have to do to win a trick?!)
What WAS it that made your mind take all that to heart? Was it really so common, that kids our age didn't actually believe they had a future until they were 18, and watched the Wall come down in '89?
That era of hope was too shortlived. You felt a shadow descend again in 2001 and I watched it smother you, little by little snuffing out hope. You tore your hair out over racial hatred, got hopping mad at Bush Jr and, after being so proud to carry banners with me down Swanston St, after a while you couldn't even see the point in going to peace rallies any more.
This was not the same man who'd gone down to the docks with Liam to support the stevedores, or linked arms with my cousin, a nurse, in solidarity.
Yes, the world changed that day. And some terrible things happened, so that it did get worse before it got better. And it's not fixed yet. But you've missed some pretty cool stuff. The US got a black man as president (and if they hadn't had him, they might just have ended up with a woman!). John Howard got voted out eventually - in a landslide. You'd probably still be bemoaning the way Julia Gillard beat me to the title of 'first woman PM' - I have you pegged as a K.Rudd fan. But we got maternity leave, and a carbon tax, and a Green in the lower house (my brother Luke helped put him there!). And an African woman environmentalist won the nobel peace prize...
I wish you were here to celebrate all these things, but most of all, "history is made by those who show up". And you can't do nearly as much by being perpetually AWOL.
