The American Dream is more than myth and legend for Ronan Fagan – he's lived it. Originally from County Wicklow near Dublin, Ireland, he arrived in the US in May of 1994, two years after winning a coveted green card in the Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery.
"At that time, the economy was really on the rebound," recalls Mr. Fagan, who arrived in the US with a degree in information systems management. "I was coming from a place of between 18 to 20 percent unemployment and where the young are seen and not heard."
Driven to succeed, he quickly moved up the corporate ladder. In what he terms "really good timing," Fagan in 1997 opted to work for himself and started a consulting business that, by the time he became a citizen on July 5, 2001, was weathering the shock of the dot.com bust.
But then, only nine weeks later, his new life as an American citizen would take on new meaning. Much of Sept. 11 was spent in a frenzy, watching endless replays of the terrorist attacks on TV, while trying to contact family and friends in New York. It wasn't long before word came that a colleague and his wife, who were expecting their first child, were on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.
"That day affected me more as a humanitarian than as a citizen," he says, leaning over a cup of iced coffee. "It made me aware to keep in touch with what's going on.
"I started to realize there are a lot of … ideas about American foreign policy and its effects on people in other countries. It made me very proactive to research it. Now that I have a vote, I want to do everything I can with my vote to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again."
Although Fagan does not live in fear (he says he feels safer walking in Boston at 3 a.m. than he does in Dublin in the middle of the day), he says more acts of terrorism are possible. "I don't think you can ever stop [terrorism]. These people are fighting for what they want. We need to sit down and listen."
Mr. Fagan said the lessons of Sept. 11 are important ones. "America erects a pseudo reality of being a safe place - a Disneyland mentality…. But Sept. 11 showed that this place is not immune from the social problems of the world.
"It was a horrible thing and unnecessary, but a lot of good has come out of it. People have come together. On the one end of the scale was the gravity of the violence, and on the other end an extreme outpouring of sympathy. There's great hope for humanity."
– Steven Savides, photo by Christian Scripter
