Remembering 9/11

Do you remember where you were when you first heard the news of the attacks on the World Trade Center? I do.

It was seventh grade and I was doing...something in Mr. Castanzo's geography class. Whatever it was has been erased by the events of the morning. In particular, the announcement that came over the intercom. In what may have been the least sensible instruction they could have given, the voice instructed teachers to not turn on their TVs. No reasons or justifications were issued. Just a simple request...that likely caused every teacher in the building to turn on their TVs. Mr. Castanzo did, at least. That's when I first saw the images.

When I was a child, prior to moving to Pennsylvania, I grew up in Irvington, New Jersey, a suburb of the city of Newark. Thus, I lived fairly close to relatives in nearby Kearny and Jersey City. Visiting them often, sometimes weekly, I grew up with the New York City skyline. The high placement of my grandparent's house on the Passaic Ridge in Kearny made the city clearly visible on a nice day. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in particular would glint in the distance, grand and impressive despite being several miles away. With my uncle in Jersey City and our visits to the piers and Liberty State Park, I could almost reach out and touch them across the Hudson. I even visited them once.

To see those towers, in many ways symbols of my childhood, burning on that screen was surreal. The class just watched, stunned. Some of us, myself included, tried to continue working, but the image of billowing smoke on the New York skyline kept much from getting done. Many students in our school had parents and relatives who worked in the city and they were now beset by confusion and fear. Then the signal went dead. After the clever “don't turn on your TVs” announcement, they shut off the cable, leaving us all in the dark.

I only heard sporadic rumors in the building for the rest of the day until I got home, at which point I found out the towers had outright collapsed, the Pentagon had been attacked and a fourth plane had crashed in my own state. I watched as the normally unflappable Peter Jennings broke down into tears while reporting on the attack.

The nation had changed. Life as we had known it had changed. Before, it seemed that the world was on track into a period of peace and ever-growing prosperity. Instead, in one single act, that naïve assumption was dashed and we were reminded we had enemies in the world and likely always would.

Yet, I feel that people are already forgetting that reminder. I see so many today willing to complacently sit by. They assume that there is no threat to our safety and liberty waiting to strike at us from the shadows. They assume that we were attacked because of who we, as a nation, are rather than who they, as homicidal radicals, are.

“Never forget.” Those words don't only remind us of the people who died that day.

They remind us that complacency invites death.