Remembering and Moving Forward

I can’t believe it’s been seven years since that sunny morning when I was sitting in English class wondering just how I was going to write my blue-book exam. A knock came at the door. Does anyone in here have any family or close friends working in the World Trade Center? There were only ten students in the class, and none of us did. And for some reason that was a good thing. Then our teacher had us put away our exam booklets; we’d finish tomorrow. Great! I thought. Until we pulled open the internet browser. The picture seemed surreal. The second tower hadn’t even been hit yet when I first learned. Oh my God. What was this? And what was next? The Sears Tower? Los Angeles? World War III?

We were under attack. We spent the rest of the hour crowded in a closet listening to the radio. We heard the first reports come in of a possible plane crash in Washington, DC. Later that day, I learned about another plane in Pennsylvania that none of my teachers here on Long Island seemed to care or know much about. But it was only my dad’s second day at work in the financial district of Philadelphia, and I could hardly sit still aching to know how that city was faring. It was the second week of school and over lunch that day one of my friends, a new student from Hawaii, asked, Does this kind of thing happen often here in New York? At that moment, with the palpable tension crowding the halls of our school, my other friends and I just burst out laughing. It felt really amazing to be able to break a smile, and that’s probably the only time I did so that day. I came home from school, turned on the TV (something I never do), and just sat there for hours watching the towers get hit over and over again.

I could hardly believe it. I wanted it to sink in, for it to finally feel real. But all I could understand was that suddenly the world felt a lot less safe. I remember the Senators lining up along the steps on Capitol Hill that evening to sing the national anthem and the emotion this stirred within me. Who can forget the pride, strength, and comfort of the phrase United We Stand, which suddenly began appearing everywhere? I remember the following days when we weren’t allowed outside between classes as the dust from the towers blew over the island. I remember the sounds of the fighter jets flying low across Long Island while there was still a ban on all commercial air traffic, and I can still feel the split-second of fear that shot up our spines every time we heard an engine overhead. I remember that very Friday, September 14, when there was a call across America for a nationwide candlelight vigil at 7pm. My friends and I had planned to see a movie together that night, but it didn’t matter. We stuffed candles in our purses and, at 7 on the dot, we stood outside the theater, used a match, and held our flames for a while not knowing quite what we should do or say.

I’ll never forget how in the following months, pages of Long Island’s newspaper, Newsday, were dedicated daily to each and every one of the victims of the September 11 tragedies. Each person got a paragraph. It was beautiful to see how our culture cared enough to honor each individual, but at the same time each whole life was condensed into this, a mere paragraph. Some ink and paper were all that remained of so many lives cut short.

Today I sat at my computer sifting through old articles about the tragedy on NPR.org, trying to make some sense of it all. Yet seven years later, where have we come? America had nearly the whole world on its side on that day in September, but turned face and quickly managed to alienate itself from many of its strong allies. What have we learned? More people have died senselessly in the aftermath of the attacks than on that fateful day. I remember Bobby, my old neighbor with whom I used to go biking as a child. It shocks me still to realize that he, like so many others, will never have the chance to gaze into the eyes of a beloved, to bring a new life into the world, or to even share another sunset after a perfectly beautiful day.

The state of affairs makes me feel so powerless. I can take this feeling to the polls via my absentee ballot, but I wonder how much that will do. And if nothing changes, I feel that all those lives will have been lost in vain. Thinking about everything that has happened still makes me shake a little, and I have to consciously steady my breathing. This was the perfect opportunity for us as Americans to try to understand just why someone might want to attack us, who we are in the national arena, and what we can do to foster better international relations. But it’s been seven years, and I don’t think we’ve learned much.

Thanks to freefoto.com for the beautiful photograph.