Curt Mills My Name Is Khan Blog / Livepost

"Parallel experiences" is a term I have started to use for a psychological or historical feeling that I have no real name for.  What I mean by this may be a bit jumbled and in my own head, but I will explain to the best of my ability.  Everyone in a sense has been in two places -- where they are now, and where they have been.   Everyone has a sense of where they have been stored in their memory.  This sense is a collection of places, feelings, people, sensations, and themes that help give whatever time that is (for me 20 plus years) meaning and structure.  However, every once in a while, an experience or new fact learned enters and challenges your perception of the events of that have passed, and it can at times be a rather rattling experience.  A central question that often occurs to me in situations like this is, how would have my sense of this time been different if I had been older, or with a different, more sophisticated worldview?

The movie My Name Is Khan in the student-taught unit challenged my perception in this manner.  For me the time of September 11, 2001 was a terrifying, yet perhaps euphoric time.  I was 11 years old, and in the fifth grade during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  I had never heard of Osama Bin Laden, and I have to confess I had never heard of the Twin Towers, having not been from and never been to NYC and being 11 and those are the kind of knowledge gaps one has at that age.  I did live in the Washington, D.C. area however, and so knew people's families in the Pentagons, and could see the smoke from the fireball that had become the world's largest office building.  Following that time, however, I saw my country like never before.  American flags everywhere, and patriotism abounded like I had never seen before.  I was very, very proud even at my young age to be from this country.  Neighbor (or at least my neighbors, granted I knew and knew of few Muslim families) embraced neighbor.

Today, those feelings and that sense still very much remains, but it has been tarnished a bit by the knowledge I have accrued over the years about the horrible, awful, anti-American Muslim discrimination following the attacks.  My Name Is Khan showed it in gripping, visceral fashion.    Now this knowledge has been infused into my mind, and makes me look back at that time differently, and makes me look at that time in the fashion I described. If I had been 21, instead of 11, how would I have felt about the time I was in?  How about if I was 31?  How about if I Muslim?  Though it may seem elementary, the full scope of there are literally infinite ways to experience any situation is just now fully occurring to me.