remembering 9/11

Since the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks is coming up on Sunday and I happen to live about two miles from the Pentagon now, I thought it would be appropriate to write a little bit about how it changed me and what I think it means for my generation.

The Washingtonian wrote this fantastic article this month on where some Americans were on September 10, including what we considered to be serious public issues, how we were preparing for the slight possibility that a terrorist attack of this scale would play out, and how we operated with regard to national security.  I was in the ninth grade, just a month past my fourteenth birthday.  My family had moved to Raleigh just three months sooner, and we weren't even in our new house yet.  My school was new, my friends were new, and my dad still drove me to school everyday in his two-door Dodge Ram.  A year earlier, the most frightening thing that had happened in my world was a scary eighth grader who had threatened to bring a gun to school on the anniversary of Columbine, but I still considered school (and the United States, for that matter), some of the safest places to be.  In fact, in 2000, my whole family had visited New York City together for the first time, and I have a picture from that trip very similar to the one above.

On the morning of September 11, I had Spanish class at 7:30 and Algebra II with Mrs. Phelps, who happened to be my neighbor, at 8:20.  So, the attacks began during that class, but I'll never forget walking into Mrs. Moore's World Civilizations class afterward to see the World Trade Center on fire.  I stopped cold before wandering over to my desk with my eyes glued to the classroom TV.  We didn't cover any material that day, we just watched the news reports roll in, and it didn't take long for me to remember a 20/20 special I had seen a couple years earlier on Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.  At the time, the idea that there was a group out there who wanted to annihilate the United States seemed preposterous and arrogantly offensive to me, as I had grown up with the belief that any conflict involving the U.S. would take place outside the country.  And besides, why were we a target?  It seemed irrational based on what I had learned in history classes, that the United States is always the good guy, the peacemaker.  But that day, it just looked too intentional to be an accident, and I started to wonder if the security I felt inside these borders was just as arrogant.

I watched with my friends in the cafeteria as both towers came crashing down and the news of the Pentagon attack arrived.  My sixth period teacher, Miss Wagoner, told us flatly, "I won't pretend to be unaffected by this," and another class period was spent with all of our eyes glued to the television.  It was too new and too surreal to have set in yet, and as the events kept unfolding, it was almost numbing.  I don't think I even cried until a week or two later, when it became very clear that the world would never be the same, that the kids in my classes would bear the future burden, some of them in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not a day went by for the next year when I didn't think about what had happened, and I knew this tenth anniversary would come one day.  I didn't know what Ground Zero would look like or that I would live and work with people who experienced it here in Washington, but I do know that there's a part of me that feels compelled to work in local government and serve the U.S. because of the responsibility I feel my generation was given on that day.

I don't think we'll ever return to feeling like terrorism is more of a distant threat rooted in violent ideology than an immediate concern, and in some ways, I hope we never forget how painful that day was.  But ten years later, I think we can be proud of the progress we've made and know that those we lost that day and in the days since have contributed greatly to our ability to defend ourselves and the freedom we love.  It will be a day my generation will carry forever, but what an awesome, inspiring responsibility that will be.