In August 2001, I began the seventh grade. It wasn’t hard, mind you. I had a fairly normal schedule, aside from the advanced math class that I was taking. I was one of the only students in Pre-Algebra.
The morning of September 11, 2001, started like any normal day. I did not want to roll out of bed, but I begrudgingly brushed my teeth and trudged to the bus stop. Once I had arrived at school, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Half-way through second period Pre-Algebra, the health teacher popped her head into the classroom. She got the attention of the math teacher and said, “You know a plane hit the World Trade Center, right?” The math teacher countered by saying, “I don’t care. It didn’t hit this school. We are doing math in here.” I had a feeling that nothing too important was happening or else we would have left class for one reason or another.
Unfortunately, I was mistaken. When I entered my third period Science class, the teacher had wheeled her television to the front of the room and had tuned the dial to CNN. For the rest of the day, students moved from one room to another, only to find that every room had a TV, and every TV was showing the footage of the Towers falling over and over.
I don’t remember exactly which stations my mother watched. I remember her flipping between many different stations, sobbing as if she had known someone who worked in the World Trade Center. She didn’t, so I was not too worried about her. She watched footage for a week, continuing to see the Towers fall and blowing her way through tissues, box after box. From what I can remember, my dad didn’t watch much of the coverage. He just shook his head when anyone mentioned it.
I remember Bush saying that the men who did this were evil and that he would hunt them down. I remember people throughout the state (and elsewhere) saying that no Muslim or Middle Easterner could be trusted and that they all deserved to be deported or worse. Frankly, I was 12 at the time. I really didn’t know what to think because I had never encountered anything like it before. I know I was sad that anyone would do something like fly a plane into a building full of people. I remember that as being the first time I understood what evil truly was.
Until that day, Evil only existed in movies for me. Evil was Emperor Palpatine or the Nazis that found the Ark of the Covenant.
I managed to stay away from most of the media coverage of the attacks, so I really can’t comment on the constant stream of footage pouring out of New York City. What I can tell you is that attack was my first glimpse of Evil, and since that day, I have not looked at the world in the same light.
ghjr
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This is not included in the 500 word limit.
I felt somewhat obligated to write this. Looking back, I wish I had been so literary-minded in those days. 9/11 was a journalist’s payday and a cynic’s wet dream.
Being both, I’m sure I would have had something to say.
Mind you, I included nothing about the aftermath, the sweeping changes throughout out country, or how the day affected me personally. Those are for a different 500 words.
While I took this as a challenge from The World Itself, I need more challenges to keep the blog running. Make sure to leave challenges in blog comments, on the Facebook page, or on my Google+ page.
Truly ghjr.
Five Hundred Words On... 