What I’m Thinking About: September 11

The blogging topic for the day seems to be September 11.

I was in my senior Government class early in the morning.  First block of the day, but I had it with my best friend.  We were listening to a lecture when our (most hated) Current Affairs teacher interrupted.  He said pulled aside my Government teacher.  We heard her gasp at whatever he was telling her, and she trotted over to the television to turn it on.

There it was.

I don’t think at the moment the magnitude of what happened was apparent.  After all, in my young memory, America hadn’t ever suffered such a direct and personal blow.  At first, we all just watched in stunned silence, and then we started speculating.

“Was it an accident?”

“Did someone attack us?”

“Who would attack us?”

We didn’t hear any more of the lecture that day.  In my next class, physics, we all just sat around the TV in shock.  I remember that someone was crying.  I was mortified that the Pentagon was hit…  That seemed bizarre, unreal.

I really don’t remember much else from that day.  I feel like they let us out of school early.  I’m sure my family sat around the television.  Then the questions become:

“Did anyone survive?”

“Who is responsible?”

“Are we going to war?”

What I remember most, though, were the stories that followed.  The recordings from Flight 93 and the images of the people jumping from the burning towers are with me forever.

Now, I’m not sure how to comport myself on this day.  It doesn’t seem like we should be working or attending school.  It certainly doesn’t seem like we should be serving other people.  It really seems like we should be doing something like the Fourth of July: honoring the freedoms we enjoy and honoring the lives that were cut short by those who are afraid of those freedoms.

Day of Terror: A Photo Gallery

Where were you?  What do you remember most?  What should we be doing to mark this day?

Update.

I thought today, too, of the other ultra-violent events that have shaped my childhood memory.  The shared ones with my generation.  Columbine happened during my freshman year of high school.  Red Lake and Virginia Tech happened when I was in grad school.

It’s so strange to experience that immense amount of real violence and human pain through the television when it doesn’t exist day-to-day in my life.  All of that violence is so concentrated for an intense moment on cable news, and then *poof* it’s gone, not to be mentioned again until the next year.

And I never really know how to react or what to do whenever we reach the anniversaries of these events.  I often think about how the familes of survivors or victims must feel.

Generally, I just pray.