Personal Views: Love or Hate?
On September 11, 2001, America was attacked. My whole world fell apart before my eyes. I remember my mom rushing to my sister’s elementary school to pick her up. She looked so worried and I’ve never seen her look so scared before. I still didn’t know what was going on. I was only five years old. I remember a little while later that I started looking through papers at home and I saw this huge bomb on the front page. All over the page I saw the numbers “9/11” and that is all that stayed with me. I didn’t know what this meant and I didn’t know what it stood for but soon I learned that I would get to know it in the worst possible way. This period in America was so horrible and the worst part was the discrimination that came out of it. My dad wears a turban and he is a Sikh. People looked at him in a weird way and at times, I thought that maybe if he just took the turban off, things would be different. My father never took his turban off though because he is proud of who he is. Soon I began to embrace it and I realized that I shouldn’t be ashamed of who I am only because of what other people say or these terrorist attacks.
When these attacks happened, I started hearing so many stories from my family about random and innocent Sikh people being attacked. The television would be on in the background and the Indian news channel would be repeating various attack stories. It became background noise for me at times but I soon realized that the things that were being said on the news were actually important to me. When I heard these things, I experienced two major emotions: fear and anger. I was constantly afraid that my dad or my uncle would be attacked. If I wasn’t afraid, then I was angry. Angry at the people who attacked other Sikhs, angry at the racial discrimination that most people in my family faced. I was angry at the world. As I grew older, I began embracing this reality and the good news is that people are more educated about Sikhs than ever before. Now all I want is for people to be aware so I can let go of that anger and let go of that fear. I can't hate the people who hate me because they were simply angry or afraid themselves. All I can do is give love in the best way possible. I can give people information and make them more aware.
By: Mandip Singh
