Seven Years Ago Today . . .
September 11th, 2008 by Dan RozensonI was in the seventh grade. That morning at school, several of my classmates were picked up by their parents without explanation. Before long, people got suspicious that there was some kind of disease going around. Around noon, our teachers gathered our grade together and informed us that terrorists had hit the World Trade Center in New York and the Capitol building, based on the information they had then. My first thought was that this was some sort of drill or training exercise. But the teachers seemed legitimately confused and anxious, and it soon set in that this was real.
I began to panic when I remembered that my dad had flown from Boston to Washington that very morning. I rushed to the main office of the school so I could call home, and quickly a line formed behind me. My mom told me that she had spoken to my dad and that he was fine, but she informed me of one detail that we still hadn’t learned yet: the towers had fallen. I told the kid behind me in line, and he told the kid behind him, and so on. Before long, my mom was there to pick me up and my dad was on the line from her cell phone. I spent the rest of the day watching CNN in a mix of emotions too bizarre to describe.
I invite readers to share what they remember from seven years ago.
Tags: 9/11
September 11th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
I don’t remember much about the morning up until the special assembly that was called around 10:00 that morning. We were told, simply, that terrorists had hijacked airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, collapsing both buildings. Of course by then most of what was going to happen that day had already taken place, leaving lots of kids around me very worried about their parents’ and relatives’ safety (keep in mind I went to a private school in New Jersey, so a lot of kids had family who worked in the city). Since I knew my family wouldn’t be there, and I was a new student who didn’t have a lot of friends yet, I was left to talk about what we knew with other students, hearing lots of rumors in the process and the frequent yet poignant “my dad stayed home sick today, he would have been on the 85th floor” story. By the time I had gotten home I knew exactly what had happened, thanks to the bus driver’s radio and that fact that we could see the smoke rising from the Manhattan skyline on the drive home.
The next couple days were pretty much devoted to talking about the events with other students, and ironically was one of my first chances to get to know the people who would become my closest friends. I know a lot of people can’t believe it’s been 7 years, and honestly I agree. It’s clearly a different time, and a less united time. It’s a shame that national unity, the one good thing to come out of our darkest day, seems to be a lost cause amid partisan bickering and insufferably superficial politics.
September 13th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I was working for New Jersey Highway Authority in Woodbridge — which is just across the harbor from Lower Manhattan. I had one of the 3 televisions in the building, so when people heard the first reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center I quickly had a crowd in my office. From my window, we couldn’t see the buildings, but we could easily see the huge plume of smoke. Everyone presumed it was a horrible accident.
We saw the second plane hit on television. People immediately knew that we were no longer witnessing an accident. We knew we were under attack. Several New Jersey State Troopers who were watching it with me left, figuring they were going to be called up to go into New York City. One of them said to me “We’d better kick some serious butt this time.”
The rest of the day was divided between rumors, frantic phone calls and scrambled meetings to deal with what we believed might be an evacuation scenario on our roadways. The Port Authority was our sister agency and it was headquartered in the World Trade Center. All of us knew people there.
I’m surprised to see that, as I look back at that day, the primary emotion that I summon up is anger. How dare they attack us. How dare they bring their dirty medieval nonsense into the heart of our greatest city. All these years later, it’s so easy to summon up the anger again. No wonder the nation was ready to charge into this stupid adventure in Iraq.
But after the flush of anger is over, I feel sadness. Sadness for the folks I knew that died. Sadness for the hole in the city that is really a hole in our national fabric. Sadness that seven years later we are still at odds with one another over what happened that day and who did it. If I have any anger now, it is reserved for those who used — and continue to use — 9/11 for cynical political purposes. Shame on them all.
September 14th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I was in 8th grade. My school did a really good job of keeping the facts from us until we got out of school at 2pm. My friends and I had noticed that a lot of people were being dismissed early, but we didn’t know why. When we all got out of school, I thought it was strange that my mom, and most other kids’ parents were waiting to pick us up. Then my mom told me what had happened, and I remember it made me really scared. I was confused about the concept of terrorism and was more focusing on the fact that SO many people had died/would die. We watched CNN all day and late into the night, and then the next few days, every school assignment was related to helping us deal with and internalize what had happened. In Lit class, we wrote a letter to ourselves about how we felt about the terrorist attacks that I’m supposed to me open on September 11, 2011.