September 11

There are few moments seared into my mind’s eye like that of the morning of 9/11.  Those in the running: the Challenger exploding as I sat in my sophomore personal finance class; sitting in another class of youthful faces as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; eating the perfect avocado in the middle of an isolated Mexican field, discovering peace in myself; the morning my father-in-law took his last breath and the following minutes in which my husband and his family had to re-define what it meant to live. But 9/11. My God, 9/11.

First off, let me say, I recognize how lucky I am to live on the West Coast for the past 40 years and to thus far be physically un-touched by war. I cannot begin to compare stories with the people of Afghanistan, Syria, the Ivory Coast, or, now, New York and Virginia and Pennsylvania. This powerful memory is from the point of view of a by-stander.

But I am an American, and a human. On the morning of 9/11, I stumbled out of bed, hair askew, one eye open, and turned on the news as I got into the shower. Prying myself out of the comforting stream of hot water, I toweled off, caught by an odd, cracking note in the newscaster’s voice. Turning the corner, the tv screen looked like a movie set. One of the twin towers was crumbling, smoke boiling like steam from a volcano, breaking up the Manhattan skyline. The local reporter half-screamed, “It was a plane! A plane hit the building!”

And, then, as I watched live television, a second airliner shot onto the screen and plowed into the second tower. “We’re at war,” I mumbled. “We’re at war!” I screamed, waking up my boyfriend. “We’re at war,” I chanted, a crazy woman as I scrambled for clothes, drove to the high school, and tried to get the classroom tv’s to work. We spent the day anxiously scanning the snowy channels and surfing the internet. I still have pages of documents we printed off from early reports coming into CNN and the BBC. I believed this was the first step in World War III, that someone was waging a full scale war on us, or that we were going to retaliate on a full-scale level.

Today’s reports from CNN and the BBC regarding the perpetrators are more detailed, hopefully accurate, but just as disturbing. Authorities seem confident in their assessments of guilt, but I always wonder why. Why did we, as a human race, get here. Not how. Why.

Today’s reports from CNN also discuss the personal consequences, the physical and psychological impact on our people, especially the grieving families. Why. And the first responders. Why. And the wounded or dead soldiers. Why.