Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
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Saturday, September 11, 2010

It began like every other day

At 8:45 am, when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center, I was walking to work. It was a beautiful day. I'd stopped by the little creek and watched the fish. Everything seemed peaceful. I clocked in about the time that United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. Someone told me a plane had hit the WTC, but that had a happened before, and I assumed they meant a small plane. Everyone seemed calm, and the enormity hadn't hit yet, nor had word of the second.

I was over near the clinic when one of the secretaries told me a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. The first words out of my mouth, I am ashamed to say, were 'Well, that's embarrassing.' I mean, it's our military centre for our country, so you'd think they'd be able to defend it. She explained that jets had hit the WTC and the Pentagon, and that's when I went to find a TV, which people were slowly starting to filter to.

Looking back, I can't believe the naïveté I had that day. On the one hand, I was not surprised that people would take jets full of fuel and make them bombs. That was perfectly understandable. But that a coordinated effort to hijack four or more planes at the same time was a little harder for me to comprehend. Also, you must understand that I've never been to New York. The largest city I've ever been to is Los Angeles, and that was a brief school trip. The largest city I've lived in is Lexington, which has about 300,000. The population of five Lexingtons could fit in Manhattan alone, in a much denser environment. Our tallest building is 30 stories. One thing I found on the Internet said that by 9 am, about 35,000 workers were at their desks at the buildings of the World Trade Center. That's over twice the the population of my hometown.

So when I watched the the first tower collapse, I understood that it was horrible, and that many people had died, both in the tower and on the ground, but I didn't understand how many people were affected until several days later. I couldn't comprehend. It couldn't understand how long it would take to evacuate those towers...that so many would still have been inside. Actually, I was watching the television with a resident from New York City. He may have been Middle Eastern, come to think of it. He pointed out where his cousin lived in an aerial shot of the area. For him, he was watching his home be destroyed, the heart of his city, and didn't know the status of his family or friends. I stayed in the room for awhile, partly because it was so hard to turn away from the TV, and partly because I didn't want to leave him alone in distress.

A friend of mine later told me that his wife tended to walk by the WTC at that time every day, but for some reason didn't that day. There were probably a lot of 'near misses' out there, too.

It was a surreal day. People were in shock. I wouldn't say I was, totally. I mean, I'd seen plenty of terrorism reports during the 70s, for example. And I didn't immediately put the blame on the Muslim terrorists, because after all, the Oklahoma City bombing was domestic. But the enormity of the situation and the sheer number of which died was numbing.

Later that day I went to a meeting of the Bluegrass Medical Libraries and we tried to have a normal day. Both towers had come down by that time. I remember the programme was on PDA use in libraries, but not much else. I think we were mostly going through the motions, trying to hang on to a sense of normalcy.

I wasn't personally involved 9/11 in the sense of knowing anyone who died, who went through that harrowing day, etc. I was safe thousands of miles away. I can't imagine the hell that people endured. I suppose you could say I was affected indirectly by the oeconomic downturn, as I was partly laid off within a couple of years due to it, and although it certainly made a big difference in my life, it is insignificant compared to what others suffered. But it did affect me psychologically, like most Americans, although 1) I've never underestimated that people hate America for both irrational and rational reasons and 2) like I said, it seemed a natural progression to put a hijacking and the suicide bomber mentality together as a form of terrorism. I knew we were vulnerable, having not endured the violence found in say London during the heyday of the IRA, or Israel, etc. But I was still overwhelmed. I ate a lot of comfort food. I had all these feelings and ideas and no where to really put them. I'd watched history unfold in a big way, and as a student of history, I felt the weight of that.

About a month later, I started this blog. Although I didn't post much at first and it never really explored those feelings about 9/11, it was part of the impetus to journal my experiences.

So here we are, nine years later. I can't say we've come a long way. Two wars, whackos affecting the security of American soldiers by threatening to burn the Qur'an, people largely outside the area screaming over a mosque to be built near Ground Zero despite the fact that nice Muslim office workers died in those towers, too, a tanked oeconomy--all turning on that day to some degree.

Next year the children of 9/11, the ones who were unborn at the time, who never knew their fathers, will be turning 10 or thereabouts. They were born into a world a little more uncertain than it had seemed to be. But that sense of safety was always an illusion. Every generation has its trials. So far, I don't think we've done such a good job on this one. It's been almost a decade, and Osama bin Laden is still out there. There's a good chance he'll escape justice.

But it's not like we live in a hopeless world, either. One thing I've learnt about history is that despite ever tribulation, things do eventually get better, at least for awhile. And it's how you handle the events of your life that help define you, whether they're personal struggles with cancer or with raising kids (not to put them on an even keel, mind you, just they're both defining things in people's lives) or with great events of history.

I know this has rambled, and doesn't have much point to it. Let me just say that I want to acknowledge what happened, to remember this day, and to pay tribute to those who died and those who struggle with their experiences. I don't know if the scars of that day will ever truly fade, so long as those who experienced them are alive. I hope that someday we can feel safe again, with all our liberties intact, mind you, and that the hatred and bigotry can be defeated on all sides. I know that's not realistic, but one can hope, can't one?

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