On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I sat at my desk in the computer lab at the school where I had worked for over fifteen years as the technology coordinator. School was in its second week and I was trying to organize my “to do” list. Some things were leftover from summer break, and there is always an onslaught of problems once the teachers and kids get settled in. These were the days before iPads and Google Drive. Our network involved 25 PCs in the lab, 12 laptops in the library, and 5 PCs in each classroom, so there was plenty to keep me busy.
The radio was on. I listened to my favorite station–probably one that played 60s and 70s music. Shortly before 9:00 a.m. the music abruptly stopped. You’re all out there nodding your heads as you read this–you know exactly why. But on that day, twenty-five years ago, what we heard was unbelievable.
Is this a joke? Some sort of radio station prank?
Sadly, no.
I ran upstairs to the library and got Jackie the librarian’s attention.
Turn on the TV! Turn on the TV!
What we saw was no joke. Smoke poured from the middle of one of the twin towers in New York City (about 4 hours downstate from us) like some one had sliced into it with a very thick knife. Jackie and I stood there, frozen, not quite understanding what we saw. And then…
A second plane entered the tv screen from the left, plowed full speed into the second tower, and exploded in flames.
To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what happened next. It was likely no one else in the school had heard the news yet.
What stands out over the next few hours was the silence outside. The school is just beyond the runways of our local airport, and on a usual day the sound of planes landing and taking off was constant. But on this days there was nothing. There were no planes and the silence was unnerving.
Sometime shortly after, a plane approached the airport. What should have been background noise to me set my adrenalin into overdrive. Were we under attack too?
Turns out it was a plane that had been in-flight and looking for a place to land since all planes had been immediately grounded.
A very strange thing happened once the reality set it. The country was united–no bickering, no partisan finger-pointing. Flags went up everywhere, flown-half staff in many places. They waved from windows and porches, from cars and bicycles. We were one country against an enemy who dared to attack us on home ground.
Two songs played constantly for weeks. Enya’s Only Time was on every radio station. It was background music on TV stations that played endless loops of the catastrophe. And Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA became our new anthem for a time. One of our classes sang it every morning after annoucements and the pledge.
I had a friend who was an FDNY firefighter. He was at Ground Zero with the rest of them. He had a tattoo on his arm in memory of the many friends he’d lost. Eddie never really talked about his experience, but a couple of years later I went to visit and he took me to the museum on Staten Island. A large piece of I-beam steel from one of the towers was a featured exhibit. There were lists of the Staten Island men and women killed in the attacks: 274 souls. Nearly 3000 people were killed that day and countless others have died since from related illnesses. We didn’t go to ground zero. I don’t remember why.
Now, twenty-five years later, there is an entire generation of people who were not alive when 9/11 happened. They have no memory of the attacks and their after-effects. To them it’s something they’ve only heard about, maybe read about, but the reality of it to them is similar to the reality of the Holocaust to my generation: We knew about it, but we could have no idea what it was really like.
I held my breath yesterday, in a way like I held my breath the day the planes attacked. Would there be another attack? Surely the CIA would know if one was planned. But then again, they had knowledge of the attack in 2011.
I heard yesterday that many schools do not include the 9/11 attacks in their history courses. Young people need to know. They need to see, and hear, especially from people who lived it–who were at or near Ground Zero. Like the Holocaust, we all pray. Never again.
My friends and I talked about our memories of September 11, 2001 a few days ago. A common thread was that it was initially so surreal and hard to absorb what was really happening, because nothing like that had ever happened in America (to our memory). I remember being in the very beginning of my first semester of college, away from home, still adjusting to a different way of life. I was about to leave my dorm room for class; my door was open and a random stranger who lived on the same floor came in and said something like “did you see what’s happening in the city?” I had no idea who she was and what the heck she was talking about (a lot of my classmates were from New York City and I was kind of a country bumpkin by comparison). But, she insisted that I follow her to her dorm room, where she showed me the TV screen she and other young women from our floor were watching. Just like you, all eyes were on the screen as the second plane slammed into the tower, and no one knew what to do or think.
The next few hours were filled with developing details about the other attacks. The next few weeks (and months) were filled with constant patriotic messaging: through the radio, through TV commercials, and in the classroom. I went through a (probably not uncommon) ethical struggle between mourning a national tragedy and balking at the over-saturated, pro-American (which often meant anti-Muslim) propaganda. I think for a lot of people in my generation, that was the first time we ever really thought seriously about America’s wars in Muslim countries and questioned the rightness of it.
Sadly, I think that struggle still exists in our culture today, with many people still associating “Muslim” with “terrorist.” And, it absolutely floors me to find out that some school kids are not being taught about 9/11; both about the great personal loss, and about the causes and the repercussions.
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I cannot believe that the attack on the US is not an integral part of all school’s history curriculum.
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