Ten Years Have Gone By...

I have written on this topic many times, and yet, with the 10th Anniversary of the September 11 Terror Attacks coming up, I feel compelled to touch the topic once more. Since the last time I wrote about my experience with the aftermath of the attacks, well, a lot has changed. I have used images of the attacks in this post, and if you are anything like me, these images make your blood simultaneously boil and freeze.

But let's start from the beginning. Let's go all the way back to that Tuesday morning in 2001. I was a relatively fresh-faced 19-year-old starting my third semester at Gainesville College in Oakwood, Georgia. I had early morning classes and about a fifteen mile drive to the college everyday. That particular Tuesday I pulled into the parking lot and left the truck running, listening to the opening bits of the Neal Boortz radio show. If memory serves, the show has just entered its first commercial break of the morning. As they returned from commercial, a breaking news alert came across, at first stating that a small airplane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers.

It wasn't everyday that you heard about something like that, so I quickly got out of my truck and made my way to the library to find a computer. The first news site I brought up, CNN,

revealed that it was not a small plane that had struck the tower. A little after 8:50am I made my way to my Professor's office and told him what was happening. We returned to the library and found that the librarian was going to the Audio/Visual room. As she turned on the TV the second plane struck. We watched in horror as more people gathered around. There were muttered prayers, muttered curses. For a while it seemed no one in the room knew how to react. It seemed we couldn't even really fathom what was happening. I just leaned against the wall near the door.

As the news anchors tried to explain what was happening the picture on the screen shifted to the Pentagon, where a fire had broken out. Then we all realized that another plane had struck there. For me, this was the moment of panic. If our enemy could strike at the heart of our armed forces, what couldn't they do? I'm not going to make up some story about suddenly going weak-kneed or anything. I may have trembled a little bit, but mostly I just stood there in shock. All my life I had thought of America as the good guys. We were the ones who always tried to help people out. Yeah, things didn't always go according to plan, but if we screwed up, in my experience, we had always tried to set things right. So why would anyone want to do something like this?

I had known Matt Lewis for about a year at this point. He was older than me by a few years, but I counted him as one of my closer friends since starting college. He stood beside me through the entirety of our time in the library. Very early on he said "Well, bin Laden has screwed himself this time." I remember looking at him and asking 'Who?" He explained Usama bin Laden, and I, as a seemingly uneducated American, listened with interest.

I didn't, well, couldn't, stay in the library for much longer. I stepped out, going to my other professor for they day and telling her that I was going home. She asked why. I tried my best to explain what was going on, and she simply nodded. I left her office and went to my truck. The drive home was filled with WSB radio overtaking the Neal Boortz show to fill everyone in on what was going on in New York and Washington.

I reached my house and immediately walked next door to my grandparents. They were watching the news and they asked me what was going on. I again tried to explain it, knowing that my words were woefully inadequate to explain the situation.

I hadn't been there long when the South Tower buckled and began to collapse. My grandmother simply gasped. I remember watching as this once majestic building was reduced to a towering column of dust and office papers.

There truly were no words for what we were seeing. The second plane had struck much lower and at a steeper angle, taking out more of the supports of the tower, causing it to give out quicker than the North Tower, which had been hit first. The North Tower was still standing, and it became the source of uncertainty with each passing moment. Would it also come down?

I knew from the research hastily being compiled by the various news agencies that the towers had been built in the early 1970s, and that they were designed to survive the impact of a Boeing 707, one of the most widely used airliners at the time. But the hijackers on this morning had used Boeing 767, considerably larger than the 707. Also, these planes had full loads of fuel for cross-country flights. It was a recipe for disaster.

During these moments of anticipation word came in that something had happened in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It didn't take long to learn that it was yet another commercial airliner. I cringed a bit, knowing the my house was under a flightpath from either New York or Boston to Atlanta. I didn't have too much time to think about it, though. Mere minutes after the reports from Pennsylvania, the upper floors of the North Tower buckled out. Almost in slow motion, the girders and outer shell of the tower gave way. The building just seemed to pancake down, each floor dropping onto the one below it, forcing out air farther and farther down the building. In just seconds, that felt like hours, the second tower was gone. Both towers were gone. They had been there my whole life, an iconic image of New York, a summing up of the American mindset. And they were gone. Gone.

It took some time for the dust and smoke to clear, and once it did we were left with a shattered image of Manhattan. Where these twin towers once stood was an eight-story pile of twisted steel, concrete, and death. Fires still burned deep

within the rubble, and they would burn for days. At the Pentagon, parts of the building had collapsed. Later that day, World Trade Center 7 collapsed after finally giving in to the fire and the damage to the south side of the building.

And at age nineteen, I was suddenly no longer as innocent as I once had been. In fact, our country was no longer as innocent as it had been. We were universally awakened to the world around us. No longer could the US be the insulated little world that it had been. And for a short time we put aside our differences. We laid down our political affiliations and united. Congress stood on the steps of the Capitol and sang God Bless America.

And days later President George W. Bush visited the site of the attack and proclaimed that we would not be shaken and we would not let those that perpetrated such an attack walk free. Over the next few days the news anchors would discuss the various theories about who was responsible and why. Video was shown of various Middle Easterners dancing in the streets. Not long after the attacks and the placing of blame on Al-Qaida, the conspiracy theories began to fly. These theories ranged from the "false-flag" that our own government had placed controlled demolitions in the towers and that the planes were just a means to an end to the ludicrous: The planes were just holographic overlays atop missiles fired personally by George Bush. Every time I hear these theories I cringe. If you want to believe these things then by all means go ahead. But the vast majority of us can see through the faults of the conspiracy. For example, someone please tell me how our government could secretly place enough demolitions in the towers without anyone noticing?

It would, of course, be some time before the head of the organization was brought to justice. The mastermind was captured rather quickly, but it wasn't until May 2011 that bin Laden was taken down by Navy Seal Team Six. The Al-Qaida terrorist group was put to run in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration also led us into war in Iraq, justifying it as a stronghold of Al-Qaida. The rationale of this war is still debated today. Of course, we have changed administrations, and under President Obama the blow was struck the eliminated bin Laden.

Ten years have gone by...and I sometimes wonder if we have really learned anything from the attacks of September 11th. Sure, we say that we know why the attack was launched. Sure we say that we know all the parties involved and that we have worked hard to bring them all to justice. But have we really taken these lessons to heart?