How Could I Forget?

What follows is a recollection of what I remember from 9/11, and how that day changed me.  We have little right asking for your participation since we’ve barely been participating in the blog ourselves, but I want to open the comments section of this post to your recollections of that day and how it changed you.

It’s hard to believe that September 11, 2001 was seven years ago.  I was a high school junior sitting in French class when our headmaster, Mr. Hames, came over the intercom.  Mr. Hames was a highly eccentric man, given to exaggeration and flowery language.  So when his impassioned voice communicated to us that “a plane has hit the World Trade Center”, we shook our heads.  “Probably a Cessna doing an aerial photo shoot or air tourism”, we all thought (which still would have been a tragedy, but hardly worth interrupting class for).

When the bell rang after class, we turned on the TV in the classroom and saw a picture of the famous smoking scar the plane had punctured in the first tower.  The angle and zoom of the camera were such that the size of the hole wasn’t immediately evident; this was certainly a terrible accident, but it was still odd that Mr. Hames has chosen to announce it to our entire school during class.  In addition to his eccentricity and proclivity for hyperbole, he was also an academic purist.  Our small private school was his domain, and any interruption of the ordinary — from backpacks strewn in the hallway to proposed curriculum changes — was met with an unenviable, one-on-one tirade in his office.

Following my French class, we had a thirty minute “activities period” to have club meetings, attend assemblies, etc.  I had lingered a little in the French classroom, and had learned there that it was in fact an airliner that had hit the tower.  “What on earth was an airliner doing that close to the city?” I thought, still not knowing that it wasn’t an accident.  I made my way to the library, where almost all 350 students and the dozens of teachers at the school were crowding around a row of televisions.

The moment I squeezed through the crowd, the second plane hit the second tower, live.  It was as if the library were a space ship and a hole had been blown into the wall: all the air was sucked out of the room.  Teachers shrieked and cried.  My school began in 5th grade — there were 10- and 11-year-olds watching this.

The rest of the day is a blur.  I remember people asking me all sorts of military and aviation questions (I was big into both at that age, to the point of applying to the U.S. Air Force Academy).  I remember not being able to concentrate all day, clenching my teeth and balling my fists as I trudged from class to class, wondering how anyone could do something so incredibly evil.  I remember driving my brother home after school, listening to NPR, meeting our mom in a random parking lot to hug each other.

This was the day that I woke up to the outside world.  My generation was born into that funky time that Francis Fukuyama called the end of history.  The Cold War was over, democracy and capitalism had won, and nothing big was happening in the world.  Sure there was that whole Desert Storm ditty, and something about genocide in Rwanda, and I think I heard something about Kosovo.  I didn’t know what all that meant, if I had even heard it was happening at all.

My vision had been exclusively focused on my immediate surroundings and activities: home, family, friends, school, sports, and music.  Who cared what was happening in Washington, D.C. or China or Africa?  Who cared, actually, what was being talked about in all those text books?  I cared little for history or literature — class was a means to an end: good grades.  All I wanted to do when I was 16 was fly jets and play the drums, end of story.

History came back to life on September 11th, 2001.  That was the day my eyes saw beyond the hills of Birmingham and recognized that things much bigger and scarier than my English research paper were happening in the world.  It was the day I became interested in politics.  It was the day I came to think more critically both about our history and our future.  It was when I came to realize the importance of family and community.  It challenged and strengthened my faith.  In an odd way, 9/11 made me a better person.

Where were you when you first head about the events of that day?  What feelings did you experience?  How did your world change?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user savethedave.