Testimonials
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When he was in elementary school in his Brooklyn neighborhood, his best friend would sometimes ask him not to shout his first name in the playground. “It’s because his name was Jihad. I didn’t see the problem, recalls Sean O’Connell, 22, who graduated from prestigious Cornell University this summer. I was far too young, on September 11, to have the slightest memory of the event itself, but I gradually understood how our lives, our society, even in a diverse metropolis and multicultural like New York, could then have been shaped by fear, fear of the other, of the foreigner, of the wider world. ”
Sean admits that his generation is adjusting to a twenty-year-old reality as best they can: “The checks at airports which we are told were minimal before 2001, the police apparatus in place in our country … But Americans our age are in a strange situation. On the one hand, we approach life without yet having the means to exert a real influence on society. On the other hand, we feel that we are dependent on key events that took place even before we were born. ” He says he is marked by the faces of the thirteen young soldiers who died alongside dozens of Afghan civilians during the …
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