Remembrance

Tuesday, September 11, 2001:

I’m in my third semester at Gainesville College. It’s a nice mid-week morning. The sun is shining. There’s a light breeze. I’m doing my normal morning thing. On the drive to school I listen to Neal Boortz. He’s on his usual rants. Then, as he goes to commercial, a breaking news report cuts in. This particular report states that a small plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.

I immediately get out of my car and go to the library, knowing that Fox News or CNN will have pictures of this, and while it’s a tragedy, my interest was definitely piqued.

As I pull up the picture I immediately know that it’s not a “small” airplane. I go to the librarian and tell her what’s going on. At this point, other people are finding out about it and one of my professors comes in the library and goes to the A/V Room and turns on the TV. As he changes the channel to CNN, the second plane hits.

Standing beside me is Matthew Lewis, a fellow student, a good friend of mine, and some vastly more learned than I at the time. He looks at me and tells me how badly Osama bin Laden has screwed himself this time. Of course, I have no idea who this Osama bin Laden character is.

We watch this for a moment more and I decide to go home. I tell my other professor for that day that I’m leaving. I’m still wandering about in a state of surreal shock. This was one of those things you never thought would happen.

When I get how I walk to my grandparents house next door. They, like pretty much everyone else in the country at the time, were watching the events unfold. As I walk in they ask me what’s happening. I tell them that I don’t know.

The phone rings, and it’s my mom calling from work. She says that they’ve heard about something terrible happening in New York. I say, “Yeah, two planes have…”

And that’s when the first building fell. We watched in a sort of stunned silence as the long minutes passed until the second tower went down.

I really don’t remember when I heard that the Pentagon had been hit. But I do recall that hearing that, more than anything else, made it hard for me to sleep that night. They could hit the Pentagon, of all places. That meant nothing was safe in this country anymore.

It wasn’t long after the towers fell that word became coming in about another plane down in Pennsylvania. I began to grow worried, because my house is under a direct flight path from one of the northeastern cities to Atlanta. I can literally go out and watch planes fly in single file going from the northeast to the southwest.

But for at least a week after September 11th, while all ground traffic was cancelled, there was an eerie silence in the air. That I remember.

Thursday, September 11, 2008:

Seven years have passed since that day. Airline flights have quite obviously resumed. I haven’t spoken to Matthew Lewis in about five and a half years. The Pentagon has been rebuilt.

We’ve gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the thing that bothers me most is the conspiracy theories. To this day I still get very ticked off listening to these people. History Channel Monday night ran a two-hour program of 9/11 conspiracy theories ranging from the believable (The Bush Administration knew the attacks would happen, just not exactly when) to the absolute crazy (George Bush ordered missile strikes against the Pentagon, and using a remote control flew the planes into the Twin Towers).

I don’t think about 9/11 everyday, but it still struck me as odd that I would have such a violent emotional response to these theories. After all, none of my relatives were in the towers or on the planes. I don’t personally know anyone who was in New York City or Washington that Tuesday morning. And yet, to hear people talk about these attacks as though they were nothing more than a duplicitous government inside job orchestrated from the highest levels angers me.

I have no love for the Bush Administration. I supported him when he first took office. And as the events of 9/11 unfolded, I hoped to see a leader take action. But now, after years of mismanaged war (mostly the responsibility of one Donald Rumsfeld) I’ve grown rather indifferent to the Bush Presidency.

Then this morning I watched the memorial ceremonies at Ground Zero, The Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA. And I was thankful. I was sad that so many had died. But my heart was lifted by knowing that, in the face of danger, and going against everything we've been taught to do in such a situation, the passengers of United Flight 93 took matters into their own hands.

They did what many others wouldn't. They gave up their lives to save others.
I know I won't soon forget.