What were you doing when the planes hit the towers?I was just waking up.
I heard the reports while still in bed because my clock radio was set to a local news channel. I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit. I watched the buildings implode before heading off to work where I welcomed a class of innocent first graders and wondered what kind of world they were facing.
September 11, 2001 was the most historical, terrifying, and infamous day of my lifetime. The years before 9/11 were some of the most peaceful in recent US history. I was born in 1968. Vietnam ended in 1975. In the 26 years leading up to 9/11 the US exerted its military might in Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, and the Persian Gulf. I certainly don’t want to make light of those four military encounters, but none of them threatened our way of life. Perhaps, the most popular wars of my youth involved Luke, Darth, and Yoda.
I didn’t grow up during a World War. Nor did I have to worry about being drafted. I grew up with the Cosby family, Alex P. Keaton, and Tom Cruise flying into the danger zone over the Pacific. Michael Jackson was brightening the sidewalks on MTV and Cal Ripken was starting his consecutive games-played streak. As I grew older, I thought the world was becoming a safer place. The Berlin Wall crumbled and the Soviet Union folded.
But then it all changed. What were you doing when the plane hit the Pentagon?
I was just waking up.
Remember the way certain things were before the attacks? Remember strolling unchecked into ballparks and arenas? Remember going to the airport and being able to welcome friends and family members at the gate? Now we live with terror threats. We stand in line two hours before take-offs to get screened and scanned. Things are different. It may not be on a daily basis, but when I’m in a crowded place, thoughts of terrorism are often heating on the back burner of my mind. I sit watching a baseball game in Anaheim and wonder if this will be the site where it happens again. Last month, I was in the Staples Center for a concert. During the intermission, I found myself thinking, could this be the next target?
What were you doing when the plane crashed into that field in Pennsylvania.
I was just waking up.
I wished I’d never heard of Shanksville. It sounds like a golfer’s purgatory. But instead it’s a place with a giant hole in the ground as deep as the crater in our post-9/11 hearts. Two words: Flight 93. That’s all it takes to conjure up the memories, the stories, the bravery, the recorded phone calls, that gut-wrenching movie that I vowed to never watch again.
In the 1990s, I lived in airports and on airplanes traveling with the athletic teams from Long Beach State. Now, I rarely have to fly. But when I do … and I can’t be the only one who thinks this … but I think about Flight 93 and the heroes who changed the course of that flight for the second time in its brief journey. I wonder if I could roll to action as they did if my flight was in peril.
On September 11, 2011, I was woken to the sounds and pictures of evil. I was woken to a deliberate act of war and to the fact that there’s a group of radically passionate men who are intent on destroying America. However, in response to the attacks, I was woken by the spirit of the American people: the first-responders who rushed to the World Trade Center, the armed service men and women who have been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the government officials and intelligence-gathering people who have kept us safe, and the construction workers who are building the 9/11 memorial and the new World Trade Center complex in Manhattan.
I was woken to the changing sounds of life as we knew it. Those little first graders are now juniors in high school. We’ve been a nation at war for more than half of their lifetime. They’re growing up in a different world than I did. It’s a world where the innocence of my youth is only a dream.
