A little late, I know... but I was in my teens, just a few years older than
@MeganC .
Unlike most my age, I wasn't in school. At the time, I was engaged in a prolonged, ultimately losing battle against the local public school where I was attending, trying to find a way for literally any other schooling option than to go back into the student population that had so traumatized me the year prior. That's a story I might tell some time, though not in this public forum—but it had a major formative impact on my social and political beliefs. For that reason, 9/11 has a much different, more personal meaning to me.
It was a Tuesday morning. Bright and sunny; I live a few hundred miles from New York City where the towers were. I was home, watching TV, the morning news, around 8:50 a.m. when CBS broke in with the news of the first airliner hitting the tower. And for those first few minutes, everyone assumed it could have been an accident, a miscalculated flight path. I must have left the room—I know I took a walk that morning but I can't remember exactly when—but I didn't see the second plane hit the other tower as it happened. I'll admit I didn't quite grasp the gravity of the situation when it happened. I remember saying to someone that day, with almost a shrug, "they're saying it might be deliberate."
Within a couple of hours, it became abundantly obvious.
There are two glaring memories I have of the next several days. The first was going out a couple of nights afterward, while the entire American air fleet had been grounded, and watching a night sky with no airplanes. (Of course, some yokel decided to fly his own personal aircraft that night.) The second... was the sheer, incessant drumbeat of news. You couldn't escape it. This was back before our family had the Internet, and we didn't have cable. All the music radio stations, all the sports talk stations, dropped all their programming and began simulcasting the cable news channels. All the sports teams cancelled their games. I always had to scratch my head at that line in Alan Jackson's song about "turn on I Love Lucy reruns" when there were no I Love Lucy reruns at the time. It was all 9/11, all the time. It was stifling, there was no real escape.
But I do remember as the days passed... that was the last time we as a nation truly came together. I have to think that the reason we haven't been able to since... is social media. Facebook, Twitter / X, Instagram. They foist the most heinous, divisive content on everyone, make you hate your neighbor. If something on the scale of 9/11 were to happen today, everyone would be pointing fingers at their fellow American, and finding community with others who share the direction in which their fingers are pointing. And you end up with increasingly radical political candidates, and increasingly radical leaders, as a result.
Once upon a time I referred to 9/11 as the day America jumped the shark: that point after which everything went downhill. Perhaps that's unfair in hindsight: jumping the shark is usually an idiom used for the event that happens AFTER the decline has begun but that it had just become more obvious, and I don't think it had begun yet.
Now we have a whole generation that never witnessed it or doesn't remember it, and that has to factor into the way they see the world. Would you have ever seen such a pro-Palestine movement in 2002, knowing how Hamas was (still is) in solidarity with other Islamic terrorists? Of course not.
I weep for the fallen, and I weep for the nation that we once were, but are no more.
