If you missed tonight’s documentary on CBS entitled “9/11: Ten Years Later,” you really should make a point to watch it. Andie and I were absolutely riveted by the amazing footage of events caught by a pair of filmmakers on the scene as they happened, the poignant memories of firefighters who were some of the first on the scene, and the panoramic shots of complete devastation that I somehow managed to avoid seeing at the time.
I remember interviewing my grandparents about Pearl Harbor when I was in high school. It was one of those days that, if you were alive, you don’t forget. You know where you were and exactly what you were doing when you heard the news. I didn’t understand how that could be until 9/11 happened. Shocking, life-shattering, events have a way of searing themselves into a person’s brain.
Like everyone else who was alive and over the age of, say, 6, when 9/11 happened, I remember the day very vividly. I remember being at work and seeing news coverage of the first plane hitting the first tower. To believe that someone could purposefully steer their plane into the World Trade Center seemed incomprehensible to me as I repeated, “It’s got to be an accident,” again and again.
“I don’t think so,” some of my co-workers said.
Sure enough, they were right, as we watched a second plane hit the other tower, live, on TV. Some people started crying. I was shocked to my core. What was going on? What was next? Who would attack us in such a way? Had the world gone mad? I was ceased with a desperate urge to grab my then-3-year-old girls at daycare and hide. But who knew where was safe? Our borders had been crossed, our existence challenged.
The rest of the day was spent with everyone on edge as we continued to monitor the TV. We heard about the Pentagon. We heard about the plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And we wondered if the world as we knew it was suddenly and devastatingly over.
Turns out, in certain ways, it was.
The “safe” world we knew before we had to worry much about terrorists ceased to exist on 9/11.
Before 9/11, terrorism was a very vague concept to me. Terrorists, in my mind, were people like the Una-Bomber and Saddam Hussein and other crazies. They, it, certainly had nothing to do with our great country.
The one good outcome of 9/11 was this: It bound us together as a nation. Similar to the way the entire world bonded as it prepared for annihilation in the movie “Armageddon,” forgetting its petty differences, the attacks on our own soil inspired a patriotism that I imagine hadn’t been seen in this country since WWII. It became “cool” again to be American.
I don’t want to say that we, as Americans, were complacent and spoiled, but we kind of were. So many other countries in the world deal with hardships and tragedy on a daily basis, and we were so used to peace and prosperity (however you, personally, define prosperity, if you judge us by much of the worlds’ standards, we are extremely prosperous), that 9/11 shook our confidence in ourselves, in our might as a nation, in our assumption that we were safe.
Here’s to all the people who died at the hands of evil and cowardly terrorists ten years ago today in New York City, and particularly to the brave rescuers who risked their lives, many losing the gamble. We remember you with sadness, but also with a pride that there is still good in the world, which you so clearly demonstrated that fateful day in our nation’s history.
And here’s a reminder that the world does, indeed, contain a lot of hope, drawn for me just today by my 7-year-old, Logan:
