This Month in History: Going back to September 11

[Mel]

Article featured in Avatar - Volume 3, Issue 3 (September 2009).

This Month in History: Going back to September 11
By Jessie

September 11, 2001. I’m twelve years old and as I walk through my school I am stunned by the eerie stillness of our never-silent halls. You can’t get us this quiet with the promise of ice cream and pizza but today, a day many of us will not understand until years from now, you couldn’t force us to speak.

It’s 8:46 a.m. EDT. The school day has just started and things, so far, are normal. A terrible accident has happened in New York City; American Airlines Flight 11 has crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. But as we all know, accidents happen. It will take another seventeen minutes for the world to realize what is happening is no accident. At 9:03 a.m. a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hits the South Tower. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, crashes into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. and at 10:03 a.m., the fourth and final plane crashes into a field in rural Pennsylvania.

Here, in my small town, the world is hushed. School personnel walk from classroom to classroom, quietly instructing teachers to turn off the televisions. History is happening but it has no place within these walls. I guess they are hoping we are simply too young to notice. But dazed and frantic parents fill the school’s main office and spill into the halls. They want their children. They want to take them into their arms, to have them in the safety of their homes, as far from the outside world and public places as they can hide them. No one knows when or where this will end.

My family and I crowd the television, huddled together for hours. I’ve never been to New York City. I won’t go until years later, my first trip to see the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero, the site where the towers fell. But the New York on the television screen looks nothing like the city I have seen in the movies. People, cars, and buildings are covered in dust and the safety we felt in our schools and offices this morning is now gone; maybe forever.