9/11 15 years later

I intended to write this post on 9/11, but as I watch History Channel, it finds itself bubbling to the fore now.  And it's best to not ignore the muse when she strikes.  I'm thirty years old now, that means that half of my lifetime ago, 9/11 happened.  The time I was on this Earth before the events of September the 11th, 2001 and afterward are now equal.

When I was young, I sometimes wondered if my generation would have one of those "defining" horrible moments that go in the history books.  Morbid I know, but still:  Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, etc.  I couldn't conceive of what would happen, because we were at seemingly the top of the world, having bought into the myth of our own invincibility.  The Clinton years left the nation feeling on a high and proud of itself.  Our biggest issues were that we had a President who had lied about a blowjob, a disputed Election count in Florida, and a new President who seemed to invent what were being called "Bushisms".  For a bit, at the end of the 20th century, I thought Columbine would be the closest thing my generation had to a defining moment...and I was wrong.

I can tell you that when Columbine happened in middle school I walked up the hill to my grandparents' house as usual and grandma, granddad, and another relative were watching the news.  I can remember watching the footage, but that's all I can really tell you about that day, from that day.  Though later I'd read books on it and meet one of the first cops who went inside.  But 9/11?  I can remember a lot of it in vivid detail.  I was in Mrs. Secreta's Keyboarding course, third row, second seat from the right.  We had someone run in from Mr. Poling's room, telling us a plane hit the World Trade Center...and we turned it on just in time to see the second plane hit live.  We didn't even realize, until we turned up the volume, it was a second plane, we just assumed it was the first again.  Then Mrs. Secreta let us stop working and watch, she never let us stop before the bell before or after.  Part of me went, "that explosion looks so fake" and then, it really hit, this is real.  One plane is an accident or someone committing suicide.  Two planes isn't an accident, no way.  Some guys in the back of the room were laughing at it all.

As the announcements came on, it became apparent the office didn't know things were going on.  Mrs. Secreta tried calling down to tell them to shut up, but they'd not stop the principal, with his signature ending of "Make it a great day or not, the choice is yours".  Then the bell to switch classes occurred...and something was on the TV about a fire at the Pentagon.  Next was Mrs. Garton's science class, where we had a test, and she announced no one would be missing the test due to, "some accident in New York".  During the test the principal came on the intercom again to enforce a media blackout, telling teachers to turn off their computers and televisions.

Now this was 2001, cell phones were not in every pocket.  Bit by bit I watched more people leave my classes, picked up by their parents.  Not a clue as to what was happening.  The principal came around to ask us if we wanted to discuss what happened, but he knew what we didn't, and what I wouldn't discover until we left and I got a ride home and KLOVE was on the radio.  The Twin Towers were gone.  A plane had hit the Pentagon.  A fourth plane was down in a field in Pennsylvania (I'd later go get my doctorate only a few counties away).  There was a mass exodus from Midtown Manhattan going on.  No one was sure how many NYPD officers and firefighters were dead, because so many had been in the towers, no one knew how many people were dead.  The President was on the run (though later to return to Washington for a speech that night).  The FAA had grounded every aircraft in America and closed our aerial borders, sending worldwide flight travel patterns into a tightly controlled chaos.

I went home and watched television the rest of the afternoon until the President's speech in the evening, there was no homework to be done.  Every detail of that day from Mrs. Secreta's class onward is burned vividly into my head.  I can, in the words of one person on the History Channel just now, "not remember all I did yesterday, but can tell you small details about that Tuesday."  Today my new Freshmen started and for their entire lives more or less, America has been at war with someone, or involved in some form of military action.

It's been fifteen years since the moment that was frozen in history for my generation, and the world has changed, not for the better.  We've been involved in two costly wars.  We're more afraid than we used to be; I can't go through an airport without being patted down, forced to take off shoes, and body scanned...I say this as a criminologist who used to volunteer in a prison:  it is easier for me to enter a prison than get on an airplane.  

As for the sites of these attacks, the Pentagon section has been rebuilt and a beautiful memorial of benches stands sentinel outside.  In rural Pennsylvania, there stands a monument to the passengers who fought back.  Meanwhile, where the Twin Towers once stood, the "Freedom Tower" now pierces the sky and a memorial and museum stand in its shadow.  I went there at a conference too, as I had gone to the Twin Towers as a child, and wound my way through security checkpoints for the opening hour of its operation the day I visited.  In the beginning it was solemn and quiet; the museum had yet to open, so it was the memorial and gift shop.  People in that first hour of the day I was there, just milled about, looking at the names engraved around the base of where the towers once jutted into the sky and now waterfalls fell into the void.  I saw names I recognized from a documentary I saw about firefighters on 9/11, made by the Naudet brothers, who went into the Towers with them, and paused to mourn those I had never met, but still felt a connection to, because I had seen their lives through the lens of a filmmaker before that day, and then their last day.  However, after the first hour, more people began to arrive, some chattier, some not.

Then I heard a sound that I wouldn't have guessed I would hear there, a child's laughter.  Some people were scowling, but I could only smile.  In a time when we've been consumed by our fears of the "other" after those attacks, I can think of no better memorial than to know that not everyone who visits the site will be mired in loss and dread, but that there is a hopeful future.  A chance to laugh and not to cry.