Everyone has heard of or experienced events that are seared into the collective national conscience so that they can be replayed and retold by everyone for the rest of their lives. I think this is our brain's way of making sure that certain events enter into our history and our collective mythology. People will always remember where they were when the Titanic sunk, Pearl Harbor was attacked, President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, or when Elvis died.
While I do remember where I was when I heard that Elvis had died, that was really more of an event for my mother, who was an Elvis fan. For me, the really big event was September 11, 2001.
I am not really good at the "date game." I never win a debate about the year a movie or song was released. I always have to think back to where I was living, who I was dating, or in which bar I danced to the song in order to narrow the date to an acceptable range. However, September 11, 2001 is emblazoned into my memory. When I think of the day, I can still smell the office hallway in which I heard the first news. I remember the exact words of the person who told me that someone had flown a plane into one of the World Trade Center buildings. My first thought was to shrug my shoulders and keep on with my work. In my imagination, I assumed it was a small, single engine plane that had gone off course or a pilot had suffered from a heart attack and lost control of their plane.
The same person, a few minutes later, breathlessly shared the news that the second tower had suffered the same fate. I remember my exact response was "Someone is trying to pick a fight, and they just may get what they want." I returned to my desk, logged onto CNN, which was so overwhelmed with traffic that I could not access the website. I then tried the ABC, NBC, and CBS news sites, also with no luck. When all news sites are down, you know something is up. I ended up on the National Public Radio website.
I pulled out my small desk radio and tuned it to NPR and listened to what sounded like the end of the world. By this time, the collision at the Pentagon building had also occurred and the explosion had been heard across the river and on the national mall. Reporters on the mall were reporting stories of office buildings being evacuated and the sounds of explosions coming from the direction of the Supreme Court building. News had been replaced by rumor. Reporters were simply repeating what they heard and what they thought could be happening. And, from their perspective, they were reporting that Washington DC was under attack. I was riveted. This was my War of the Worlds moment.
Once I heard that the towers had fallen, I packed it in and headed home. If the world was going to hell, I might as well wait for it from the comfort of my sofa while watching it happen on CNN. Looking back on it today, it was the first time that I felt true despair over an event that was so far away. I kept wanting someone to explain what was happening. Where was the President? Even though I had not supported his run for the office, I needed to be comforted by a person who was in control. I spent the rest of the day, along with the rest of the nation, watching the replays of the towers falling and listening to reporters desperately trying to make sense of the day's events.
Ten years on from that day, I think of how the world has changed. Besides the inconvenience of a virtual strip search whenever you want to board a plane, there are the more subtle changes and perhaps lingering questions that continue to trouble the nation. How could so few people, with so few resources, change so many things that we once took for granted? Perhaps it really only took the plotting of three men in a cave in Afghanistan to make us lose our confidence and go into permanent crisis mode. I mean really, have we been in anything but crisis mode for ten years now? Our politics, finances, economy, and public discourse all have the shrill pitch of that crazy person holding up the sign to alert all passersby that the end is near. But, what if it is not? How do we dial it back?
These are the things that concern me now - ten years later.
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