by Joel Bocko
[This post was written exactly one year ago. I wanted to somehow pay tribute to the day, which is almost over, and passed without much notice from me, to a further extent than anytime in the past eight years. Feel free to share your own thoughts and memories below. I know the anniversary is almost over, but perhaps it’s a good idea to extent the conversation into the next day, as a reminder that the cloud of September 11 hangs in the background at all times. Not an especially pleasant thought, perhaps, but, I think, a necessary one. – Joel]
On September 11, 2001, I was 17 years old, a high school senior in New England. In my morning science class, the teacher was discussing global warming when a voice came over the intercom. It was the principal, who had a deep voice that only popped up when tragedy struck (that spring, he’d announced the death of a student who’d been ill). At this point it was already about 10:15 am, and he stated, as flatly (and terrifyingly) as possible that terrorists had hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I know a lot of my friends heard the news sooner, with the details building bit by bit, but for me it was like being hit with a ton of bricks. We all stared at each other, jaws dropped…was this real, or just a movie? One kid, a bit of an oddball who later joined the military to do psych ops proclaimed, “this is going to wipe Chandra Levy out of the news!” My science teacher, without missing a beat, pivoted in his anti-Bush argument vis a vis global warming, to attack the idea of a missile defense shield: “how the hell would a missile shield block airplanes?”
We just remained in our seats, stunned, until the bell rang. En masse, everybody moved downstairs into a lobby where there were TVs hanging from the ceiling. On them, one of the Twin Towers was collapsing, over and over again. A teacher nearby suddenly started babbling, hysterically: “They’re gone? They’re really GONE? They’re not there?” One of my friends, a die-hard Democrat who later joined the Navy (I believe he’s still serving) told us, “this is when I’m glad Bush is president, because he won’t let them get away with this.” I told my classmates it was probably that guy Omar Laden or something…I’d heard his name mentioned in the past few months. We sat in my history classroom and stared at the television. John McCain appeared on the commentary to say that we were at war. At the time this struck me as a strange notion. My initial thought that morning had not been, “We’re at war and must defend ourselves,” but rather “My God, the world is coming to an end.”
I generally like to avoid personal stories on this blog; the Internet is fun for the way it confers anonymity and anyway, it all gets in the way of what I’m really doing here. Lest you think I’m departing from the blog’s mission, this entry is not a recollection of what happened 7 years ago, but a review/reaction to the television film “9/11” aired, I believe, one year later (it may have premiered on the six-month anniversary but I saw it for the first time on 9/11/02, by which time I was living in New York). I open with my own memory, at once mundane and shocking in the way that everyone’s memories of that day will always be shocking, as a reminder of how personally 9/11 struck everyone and how, with so much water under the bridge (yet so little accomplished) the emotions and sensations of the day can come rolling back instantly. And that’s what “9/11” is about.
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