What Those Who Sacrificed For 9/11 Deserve From Americans Now
Remembering on a day we must never, ever forget
What Those Who Sacrificed For 9/11 Deserve From Americans Now
22 years on from September 11, 2001, it feels as if that tragic day is becoming a distant memory. With the passage of time, and given those writing the history, I fear that we as a people will forget.
It is imperative that we remember — that we remember the nature of the evil inflicted upon us that day; that we remember how that evil came to pass; and that we not only remember, but learn the lessons of the raft of catastrophes that followed in its wake, which loom over myriad aspects of our nation to this day.
For my part, two years ago I felt compelled to publish a remembrance memorializing my own account of that day, and my unvarnished thoughts about how we failed those who sacrificed, and what we must do to remedy it.
I share it in part below.
“Will you please report to the main office?”
Those staticky words, preceded by the names of my classmates, echoed over and over again from old junior high school loudspeakers 20 years ago this Saturday. They still echo in my mind today.
The drumbeat of student dismissals banged on for what seemed like an eternity. Growing up a short 40-minute drive from lower Manhattan in a New Jersey suburb of city commuters, each call hinted at the worst of possible fates for my classmates.
One of them would never see his father again. Others would return home to hugs and kisses from parents vowing never again to speak of what they had seen.
“A small plane hit the World Trade Center,” someone had reported early that morning in the lunchroom before classes commenced. We thought it about as credible as any other middle school rumor — we shrugged it off.
Yet the ashen faces of teachers, and the non-classes that droned on, agonizingly quietly, told my eighth-grade classmates and me a different story: Something incomprehensibly terrible was afoot. I wondered if my father, who I vaguely understood was working on a project in the Wall Street area, was okay.
Suddenly, a deluge of additional wild rumors broke out — that the White House was hit; that the Empire State building was hit too; that America was under attack.
For those in my classes, we saw nothing. The TVs in the few rooms equipped with them remained off. Perhaps it was for the best, though at the time I remember feeling livid to have been in the dark.
It was a perfect fall day in a leafy town at the start of a school year filled with promise. And it was the day that my classmates and I, our generation, and arguably the country itself lost our collective innocence. Nothing would ever be the same again.
It wasn’t until early that afternoon when my mother came to pick me up from school, telling me in disbelief “The World Trade Center no longer exists,” that I began to understand the gravity of what had transpired.
I learned that my father was safe. He had called that morning — from his office near the New York Stock Exchange, which he feared might be a target — before my mother knew what was happening, to say he was fine, and was getting ready to move out of his office. He wouldn’t return until late in the day, as he worked to get his colleagues out of New York safely.
Communications shortly after my parents’ call had ceased due to overload and damaged lines. Once home, I saw for the first time the unthinkable images of the events of that day, watched them over and over, and couldn’t make sense of them. I would do the same thing for weeks, transfixed like millions of other Americans.
As I waited for my father to come home, I remember venturing out to the front lawn with my younger brother to have a baseball catch. As a 13-year-old who knew little of the world, that was the only thing that made sense.
When my father finally came home, I recall he had a scowl, and a hurt in his face that I could not remember ever having seen. He was mentally and physically spent, running on fumes. He was covered in soot, and perhaps worse. Over time I would probe him about what he saw, and lament that he had seen it.
I’ll never forget visiting New York shortly after September 11, 2001, and seeing, walled off, from blocks away, the twisted heaping mass of smoldering iron like some crushed Erector Set. I’ll never forget the plume of smoke that seemed to billow over Ground Zero for months thereafter. I’ll never forget first seeing our old Volvo station wagon, stranded in a New York garage for a long time after that fateful day, finally returning home, coated in the same detritus as my father.
That day left an indelible imprint on the lives of every American. I thank God for how lucky my family was. Far too many were not.
You can read the full piece here.