My mom was listening to the radio in the kitchen when I came downstairs for school. It was still dark outside. She told me that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. I had no concept of what that meant.
Someone rolled a TV into my freshman English class. It was black with a gray bubble screen and sat on a tall cart. All day, in every class, we watched the planes exploding, the towers collapsing, the people covered in gray dust running. Screaming. Holding onto each other. Crying.
One of my teachers told us that Washington state was a possible target because of Grand Coulee Dam. I wanted to tell him to get bent.
Another teacher came into our Home Ec room and turned down the volume, it wasn’t even his class. He told us that this was really important and significant and we would all remember it forever, just like he had the JFK assassination. And he was about the tenth person to tell us that that day and it still didn’t sink in.
That night, my mom, my brothers, and I went down to my grandma’s and watched our president speak from behind the Resolute Desk. He quoted Psalm 23, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
Walking back to our house I saw the stars above the dark outline of the barn. For the first time I knew that the world was bigger than I could feel and there was more of it than I could ever let in.
In 2008 I was awarded a scholarship to go to New York for a humanitarian conference and I saw ground zero. It was a massive pit. The big dump trucks were way down in it and looked small. Cleaning it up seemed like an impossible task. One that might never be finished.
On the tenth anniversary I was in my apartment in Korea watching English news late at night. There was a documentary where George Bush explained how nervous he was to throw out the opening pitch for the World Series. He had waited until game three so that he could do it in New York. He wore a NYFD sweater with a bullet proof vest underneath. “I've never felt anything so powerful and emotions so strong, and the collective will of the crowd so evident,” the president said of standing on the mound before throwing a strike across the center of home plate. It was perhaps the greatest thing he ever did.
My friend’s family bought me ticket to New York in 2016 for her thirtieth birthday. By then One World Trade Center had risen from the ashes. The footprints of the two towers had been made into fountains and there was a museum underneath. I learned about the people who jumped rather than be burned alive or crushed when the towers collapsed.
Falling Man taken by Richard Drew, September 11th, 2001.
When I went to Newfoundland in 2017, I read a book called, The Day the World Came to Town. 38 flights that had crossed the Atlantic but could not land on the east coast were diverted to an airstrip left over from WWII in Gander. At the drop of a hat, the town of 10,000 rallied to provide food, shelter, and communications for the nearly 7,000 stranded passengers.
The reason America did not cower or descend into disunity after the attacks can be attributed to all those who responded to great evil with even greater courage. The firemen, policemen, and paramedics who climbed flight after flight of stairs and never reached the top. Those who stood in line to give blood. The rescue workers and volunteers who sifted through the rubble. The roughly 150 members who gathered on the congressional steps that evening and impromptu sang “God Bless America.” The hospitality of the Newfies. My English teacher, who shut off the TV and told us to take our journals and write.
On September 12th, the French newspaper The World (Le Monde) ran a headline that read simply, “Nous sommes tous Américains.” We are all Americans. On September 13th, Queen Elizabeth, God rest her soul, directed the Coldstream Guard to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” outside Buckingham Palace, amending a tradition that had not been abated since 1660.
Before the war on terror, the Department of Homeland Security, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and locked cockpit doors, Americans sang the national anthem at assemblies and sporting events together. Businesses and residences were bedecked with red, white, and blue. Before the color-coded terror warning system, two invasions, drone strikes, and freedom fries, there was a moment in time, where after witnessing the worst of humanity, we saw the best in each other.
Today we commemorate that September morning when 2,977 lost their lives, and we acknowledge the aftermath when we saw ourselves rightly, the depth of our depravity and virtue, for a fleeting and hallowed moment.
iStock.com artist: grafficx
Music:
The Star Spangled Banner Instrumental by U.S. Army Bands
God Bless America Instrumental by Rev. Austin Fleming
Sources:
After 9/11, George W. Bush was called upon to throw the perfect pitch at the 2001 World Series.
The Day the World Came to Town
The Singing of God Bless America
Le Monde: Nous sommes tous Américains
Queen Broke Tradition to Play American National Anthem at Palace After 9/11
Good commentary, Nate. 21 years ago on 9/11, I was in a friend of mine's apartment in Bangkok, Thailand. We saw the towers fall, and I figured that Thailand was going to be my home for quite a while. So much to look back on. T.M.
Thank you for writing this post.