These are my thoughts on the tenth anniversary of September 11th.
Ten years ago, September, 11th 2001 I was a 6th grader at Meridian Middle School, sitting in Mrs. Leipf’s class, when I first heard about what happened in New York City. Someone said the Twin Towers had been bombed, I didn’t even know what the Twin Towers were until someone said that they were the big buildings on the Spiderman preview I had seen at the theatre. Mrs. Leipf came in and gave us the news in the somber tone I now realize was the same as the one Ms. Steinhoefel used in 3rd grade after Columbine. Everyone was silent but my initial reaction was to feel sorry for my teacher, since it had obviously upset her.
I used to be embarrassed to admit to myself that I didn’t really think of the people inside the burning wreckage of the skyscrapers initially. But I couldn’t understand abstractions of far away events other than superficially, my teacher’s distraught face though burned the emotional side of the tragedy permanently into my mind. As a child I could understand fear, if not terrorism, I could understand confusion, if not anarchy, and I could understand loss, if not body counts (which were estimated to be many times the real number at that point). An Idaho resident may never know the full blunt of the horror that the residents of New York felt, but I knew the nation mourned with them that day.
The school was silent in class in the presence of adults, we knew how to show proper behavior in the moment of tragedy, but in the Hallways, the break areas, and the cafeterias a low intense buzz filled every inch. Most kids talked about the end of the world, the irony of the date being the same as the emergency line, and a lot about God, trying to sort through this mess with what parents, television, and our imaginations had taught us. Most seemed worried but an undercurrent of excitement filled the room. Our generation was one raised on Nintendo, internet, blockbuster action films, and 9 o’clock news reports of daily murders, we coped by compartmentalizing the real world into the rules of virtual reality. We knew from that most problems could be solved in a two hour block, or at least by the end of the next level.
But as my generation has grown up, the magnitude of what September 11th really meant has filled out and expanded in our minds. It still comes up now and again in conversations among college students, “Where were you on September 11th when you found out?”. We’ll be the last to authoritatively tell our grandchildren what that day was like because we lived through it. We may not have understood, but the weight bit by bit fell upon all. The world we are now inheriting was changed by one day. The first time I felt the weight was when I realized I couldn’t see “The Matrix” because it was now rated “R” and my mother wouldn’t let me. I felt the weight when I was randomly selected for extra screening at airport security when I was 15 years old and flying for the first time in my life. My generation has watched a national tragedy become a political tool for those on both sides of the political spectrum. We had watched as the brief unity after that day unraveled into rabid bi-partisanship. But the images policemen running into hell to find others, of strangers crying and embracing each other when there was no one else, and of firefighters raising the American flag are still the first thing’s my mind goes to when I think of that day.
