As the world yesterday marked the 12th anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., one cannot but also mark the fact that few are the ways in which the atrocity have not affected our lives and changed the world forever.

Not only was the heinous attack an attack on the United States, nor was it an attack on the Western world – it was an attack on the entire world.  Of course, terrorism was no novelty back in 2001 but the sheer magnitude of the death of innocents, some 3,000 people, has changed the global mindset.

The way in which we travel, for starters, to the basic way in which many view the world and trust each other will never be the same after the events of that pivotal day.  Terrorism in the post 9/11 world has taken on not so much a new meaning but, rather, but an enhanced meaning.

The multiple memories of that tragic day have left an indelible mark on our collective memory.  Utterly reprehensible in every way, those heinous acts represent a condemnable and twisted view of one of the world’s great religions, and the perpetrators through their despicable actions rendered a great disservice to its followers.  And those Muslims who do not subscribe to extremists’ warped interpretation of their religion have borne and suffered many consequences of their actions.

The ramifications of that day have reshaped the very parameters of the world in which we live.  The ensuing invasion of Afghanistan and the so-called War on Terror - although arguably necessary in some respects – has curtailed freedoms and human rights to such an extent, in some respects, that it has helped to fulfil, by definition, the terrorism that began that day.

The attack’s perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, has now been slain after a 10-year manhunt but the minions that sprouted up in the wake of the attack are still very much active, and some governments have stepped up intelligence and surveillance activities to such an extent that civil liberties and privacy are being trampled upon, as recently exposed by Edward Snowden.

One must ask what the world would be like today had 9/11 not happened.  Would Afghanistan still be under Taliban control, would Saddam Hussein still be in power, would the Arab Spring have even taken place?

But the answers to these and other questions will never be able to be answered with any large degree of certainty but there can be very little doubt that the tragic events of 11 September, 2001 have permanently and irrevocably changed the world in which we live.

That change is symbolised succinctly by this editorialist’s recollection of a fine summer evening in July 2000, standing in the plaza that once lay between the World Trade Center’s twin towers and gazing upwards, as millions of others have done, at their seemingly endless rise into the night sky.   The events that were to take place there a little more than a year later were, at the time, unimaginable. 

A year after the attacks and that same spot, by then renamed Ground Zero, it was an altogether different scene. The site was still bombed out and the surrounding buildings were boarded up and pock marked. Religiously, though, a US man dressed as Uncle Sam, visited everyday and played rousing tunes on his pipes. And that symoblises the spirit of the city.

Short of sparing a moment of silence for the victims and their families, it is difficult to commemorate such a terrible day.  But in a number of countries thousands of volunteers have pledged to do good deeds this week as a commemoration, and in so doing they are fighting back in a little way against the evil that was perpetrated on that fateful day 12 years ago.  We should all follow their example.