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April 01, 2009

We Knew We Would Never Forget

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In the summer of 2001, I was on a day trip to New York City. After visiting the Guggenheim, the Empire State Building and walking to the center of the Brooklyn Bridge and back, we decided we'd catch the World Trade Center next time.

A few months later was the first semester of my senior year of college. The first week of class. I wasn't scheduled to have my government class until that evening, so I slept in, unaware of the events that would come to be known as my generation's Pearl Harbor. A friend of one of my apartment-mates was screaming "the World Trade Center has been attacked!" Still half asleep, I brushed off the screams and stuffed my face into the pillow. The screams got louder. Then the knocks on the door. I don't quite remember exactly the exchange, but before I knew it, the whole apartment was glued to the television.

We watched as the first tower burned. We saw the second plane hit. We saw the towers fall.

I hope this is a dream, I remember thinking, but I knew it wasn't. My thoughts shifted towards the likely thousands of people in the tower that couldn't get out. I thought about the people I know who live and work in the city, everything crossed my mind. We may not have known for sure what was really happening, but we all knew that at that moment we watched the towers fall one after the other, we were changed.

I've never watched the news more in my life. I was so enticed by the events that I didn't eat my first meal until dinnertime, which came early that night since my government class was canceled.

The next few days were virtually the same. People were worried, some trying to make sure their families were okay. The tragic events of 9/11 did succeed in bringing out something inside everyone that had long been dormant, perhaps non-existent. All of sudden, the whole university was a one large community. We weren't small hamlets of groups; the fraternities, the sororities, the Student Government or one of over a hundred different clubs. None of that mattered. All of sudden, we were one community. Much like what happened in Washington, we forgot about the associations that make us different, and realized that we all needed each other.

Days later, we were still watching TV. My most vivid memory of that week was the famous visit to Ground Zero by President Bush. I was thankful to have been watching it live. We had heard that our Commander in chief was going to tour the ruins, and we were waiting. It was my brother, my roommate, and me, sitting on the couch, when the President finally made it on the screen. We remarked on how brave he was to be there. We sat in silence listening to our President. We knew that he didn't have words prepared for him by speechwriters, and we were now watching the man behind the man. We were anxious at what we were about to hear.

I hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!

At that moment we heard those words, we were no longer silent. We all looked at each other and started to cheer as if the New England Patriots had just won the Super Bowl. For the first time since the towers fell, we were celebrating. We needed that. We were so proud of the President at that moment; we later found audio clips of the speech and downloaded them to our computers so we could listen to them at our leisure. That day we were proud of our President, and even prouder Americans.

The week of September 11th is something that will always stick with me partly because of where I was at the time. While some details will get fuzzy over time, while others will come and go, the effects of that time in our lives are everlasting. We knew we would never forget.

I always wondered if there would be an event so profound and life changing in my lifetime that I would remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard about it; much like how my parents' generation remembers the John F. Kennedy assassination. September 11th, 2001 is that event, and 30 years from now, the memory of that day and the those that followed will still be with me. I will never forget, and God willing, history won't forget either.

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Blogs For Bush and Michelle Malkin post round ups of bloggers who remember.

Posted by Aaron at April 1, 2009 12:00 AM

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Posted by mattk at September 11, 2005 04:59 PM

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