"Have you heard? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center."
"What?"
"Come on."
He literally dragged me through the lobby, out into the hall where we could see through the glass walls of the little barber shop to the television mounted on the wall.
"That sure doesn't look like a small plane hit," I thought, as we turned back to the office. Noel didn't have much information, as none of us did in those first hours. All we had was that sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs - this was going to be bad.
Back in my office, I tried to pull up ABC News' web site.
I couldn't connect.
Running the my radio up and down the dial, searching for the all-news station. By the time I located it, the second tower had been hit. This was deliberate?
Outside my office, things went on as usual. Cheerful country music flowed from the overhead speakers, and coworkers discussed pending invoices. They hadn't heard?
When word came that the Pentagon had been attacked, the country station switched over to the all-news feed. Work slowed as people stopped to listen, or surfed the web looking for more information. Finally able to connect to a news site, I watched in horror as the north tower burned. It was inconceivable that these towers, these symbols of our country's strength, ingenuity and status, could crumble into dust. A few minutes later, the image on my screen also turned to dust, as the north tower collapsed.
Reports of a fourth plane, downed in a field in Pennsylvania, swept through the office. shortly before noon, the University closed.
____________________________________________________________
Two things stand out in my memory from the days following the attacks. The first is the silence.
Living fairly close to the take off/landing patterns for Mitchell International, I'm used to the fairly frequent sound of planes overhead. The silence following the grounding of all flights was more disturbing than the noise had ever been. The quiet skies seemed to be shouting, "We aren't secure, no country is invincible, nothing will ever be the same."
That feeling that this was a moment of irrevocable change, a shift in the very basis of a national self-image, is the second memory. We no longer live in a world where terrorist attacks happen over there", where we are absolutely secure in the primacy of the United States in world power, and nothing will ever be the same.
This article, by Joe Lieberman, explains what I think both more eloquently and clearly than I could ever do. (h/t the Llamas) His last line says it all:
History tells us that appeasement of evil leads to disaster. Our cause
is freedom’s cause. Together, we must prevail.
No comments:
Post a Comment