I still remember getting dressed that tuesday morning. Red oxford shirt. Hideous blue uniform shorts.
As usual, I had no time for breakfast. Two freshly printed essays were safely tucked away in my backpack and my sister was complaining that we would be late for school, again. On the morning drive we listened to the oldies station and when we parked in my coveted Senior parking space at our high school. I bid my little sister a quick goodbye and ran off to find one of the English teachers.
I raced to Mrs. W's room, anxious to show her my scholarship essay. We discussed with great enthusiasm my hopes for the months following graduation and the adventures that lay in wait. I longed to go out into the world and change it, to leave it a better place. Like most high school seniors, I was brimming with possibility and everything in that moment was hope, determination and invincibility.
Then we all marched off for the second chapel message of Spiritual Emphasis week. We had a guest speaker scheduled to speak all week long about our relationship with Christ and about witnessing to others. He was the Billy Sunday type, charismatic to the point of being annoying. It would be more appropriate to say that the school invited someone to yell Bible verses in our ears for an entire week. He had no sense of voice control and absolutely hollered every point at us. That morning he was making a particular point, "Nobody knows when they are going to die. It could happened at any moment. Where would you go if you died right this second?" I remember wondering why speakers always tried to scare teenagers into loving Jesus. My mind wandered as he continued with his fire and brimstone.
Suddenly, one of our guidance counselors shuffled into the room with a frantic look in his eye, he walked up to our speaker and whispered something into his ear. Our speaker, being a man of great opinion and zero tact, said the following words:
"I was just informed that a plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers. You see? No one knows when their final moment has come. They didn't know it. Do you know where you are going?"
He continued to belabor the point. We were shocked. Someone in the sophomore section of the auditorium let out a strangled cry, her Dad was in New York on business, mainly at the WTC. Then people began shifting, whispering, crying. Our brilliant speaker continued much to the horror of our guidance counselor. He literally had to wrench the microphone from this man's hands in order to offer up a prayer and send us all to our classrooms. I barely heard a word. A feeling had seized our small school and it was thick with fear and panic.
No one had yet uttered the words "terrorist attack," but somehow it permeated the air just the same. I began searching the bleachers for my sister and found that she was already looking at me, and her face was extremely pale. We were told to walk quickly to our homeroom classes.
The school, obviously confident in their ability to efficiently corral the students into rooms and wait for further news, were not equipped to handle the insanity of some of our parents. When I reached the outside of the auditorium, it became evident that something far greater than a mere plane accident was in our midst. Parents awaited us. Frantic parents. One mother in particular, hysterically weeping and telling us to prepare ourselves, that the end was upon us.
No one had ever said things like that to us before. It was a Christian school, we had our share of lame ineffectual speakers, most of us were believers, but we had never seen an adult in true panic that the end was at hand.
Then we saw our teachers. Some were calm, others worried, and one man in particular, our resident conspiracy theorist and my homeroom teacher, stood ready to inform us of political implication and impending doom. We filed into his room, the TV already tuned into CNN and smoke from the towers seemed to lift off the screen and penetrate the room in a cloud of confusion. My boyfriend at the time asked him, "This wasn't an accident was it?" Our teacher began listing potential terrorist organizations that were suspect in his book. He was regaling us with the possibility of an incensed drug cartel in Columbia when the second plane hit. The shock of being informed of the first plane was nothing like the horror of watching the second one slam into the tower and shatter that last thread of youthful innocence. No one felt invincible anymore. The world we so longed to break into now lay broken at our feet, and someone outside was still screaming that it was the end of the world.
Our homeroom teacher gaped at the screen a few minutes before turning around and stating that our city was quite possibly next. I remember the shot of realization that I had zero respect for this teacher and that I didn't really give a darn what anyone at school would have to say to me that day. I only had one thought racing through my mind. Where was my sister? I quickly ditched the boyfriend and homeroom and went in search of her. I had left her that morning, still surrounded by the cloud of peace and safety that had enveloped us all our lives. It was suddenly gone now and I needed to see her before any of it could sink in. I needed to make sure she was safe. Even if every adult in sight was crying, "the sky is falling!," I would not head for safety until she reached it first.
I can't remember what our first words were. But I know that we were both on the verge of tears. Our school security guard was not allowing any student to go home unless accompanied by an adult. We got in our car and I threatened to run him over if he didn't let us through. He stepped aside after a few other threats were hurled over the top of my window at him. The drive home was a blur.
We came home to find my mother, glued to the television with a look of sheer horror on her face. A handy man was working in our home that day and he stood watching as well. The handyman's father, recovering from recent surgery, was also laid up on our couch and responding to everything the bewildered reporters were saying.
"Did you see that?" he asked. "Someone just jumped from the building. I wondered what that was. Its people. God, they are jumping from the building. They must be roasting alive in there."
I closed my eyes and remembered gazing up at the towers just a few months back. On a visit with my Dad as I checked out Columbia University. People were falling on the pavement where I had stood, wistfully enveloped in the dreams of my future.
We watched together as America fell to her knees when one tower tumbled down and then the other. The beautiful country that blessed our family with political asylum, gave us a home and our freedom, lay vulnerable and bleeding. We watched until that last tsunami of smoke radiated throughout the city. Then the reports flooded in. The pentagon, the field of dirt in Pennsylvania, the terrorists.
We left for a time of prayer in our church that night, the horrible reality of it all pounding in my heart, the charred bodies falling through the sky of my mind's eye.
Maybe I wouldn't remember every detail of that day if I had been a few years younger, the excitement of adulthood many years ahead of me instead of mere months. But my idealistic heart had been so set upon the change I could bring to the world, that when the world changed suddenly with such irreversible horror, I lost my footing.
America was flooded with fear, more so than ever before. But the fear was not outweighed by pride. Pride for our country, love for one another, respect for our heroes and for those that fought for our freedoms. Even if I felt a strong measure of fear, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride in my country. How sad that we suddenly turned in on each other. That pride and love dissipated so quickly into dissension and disrespect. Our leader received a daily flogging for his decision to protect us. The injustice that had taken place in our own country was quickly pushed aside.
One year later, I stood on the fairway of my university along with my new classmates and stood silent for eleven minutes, still wondering, "why?"
I have held such minutes of silence for the past 8 years now, including on 9/11/01 itself. The change I have brought to the world so far is the way I raise my children and the manner in which I use my words. A new change has taken hold of my country. One that has stirred the lion in me. The lion that felt defeated before it could cross the threshold, is now pacing. After all, I have two little lion cubs to protect and this country does not belong to one man but to all men. This country is not about undying devotion to one man but about service to all men. I will not stand by in idle passivity. I will not delude myself into believing that information is out of my reach and I had better leave the decisions to those that are "informed."
There are many ways of bringing a country onto its knees. Sometimes a few airplanes are all it takes; sometimes it is the breeding of government into one giant all consuming machine of ill conceived reform; and sometimes it is the smug pride of one man bending law after law before God and countrymen that can bring a country to its end.
I remember the moments of 9/11. The moments that ended a thousand potential moments. The moments that destroyed a thousand future birthdays, weddings and celebrations. The moments that forever annihilated the shared cups of coffee, movie dates, and Super Bowl parties of many families. I remember the passion and pride we felt in the days that followed. I remember the lessons I learned in early grade school about freedom and liberty. I remember that last November one man brought a volatile form of change to our country.
I remember above all, that America belongs to us all. That our own change can be achieved if we are brave enough to stand up for our rights and not allow the criticism of advanced technology drown out the cry of the people. God Bless America.
