Moving On From The Unforgettable

 

     

      I am an unapologetic Marvel Universe die hard. Having grown up with comic books, and now seeing the stories and characters come to life has been a joy.  The most recent storylines, especially in the mini-series “Loki”, have been about time, and the way it plays with us.  Now in my 50’s, I can attest to the fact that someone pushed the fast forward on my life.  The last twenty years have been a blur, whereas the first twenty moved achingly slow for me, which is why it should be no surprise (yet still is) that the twentieth anniversary of one of the darkest, most unforgettable days in our history, is now here.

     When I say time likes to play with us, it’s a cruel game. I recently saw a post that said the amount of time between 1980 (when I was 12) and now is the same as 1939 and 1980.  Mind blown.  And what makes it even tougher is the fact that our memories don’t like to cooperate.  I find myself recalling events that I believe happened a few years ago, only to find out later it was more like fifteen.  To pile on to that, my mind keeps a snapshot of myself at the age of 25 so that I can be torturously reminded every time I pass by a mirror that I am more than double that, and look like it.  These days I have a difficult time remembering what I did the previous year.  Yet, September 11, 2001, in many ways feels like last week.

     About five years ago, it came to my attention that the students sitting in front of me were born after that awful day.  They had to remind me of this.  It took me a minute to do the math, and even though I knew they were right, a part of me wanted to deny it.  I have four kids (now mostly adults) of my own.  Two born before and two born after, and even with them I have to really try to remember how little they know about what happened, and more importantly how the rest of us, who witnessed that day, felt.

     I was 33 and entering my tenth year as a social studies teacher at the old Uxbridge High School (now known as the McCloskey building).  It was a beautiful fall day, very sunny and clear.  Brian Beck was my classroom neighbor, and opened my door to inform me that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers in New York City.  It didn’t register as much, and the first thoughts were of a small Cessna losing its way in the clouds.  A similar event happened with an Air Force bomber and the Empire State Building in 1945, so no huge red flags jumped out at me.  It wasn’t long before he opened the door again and said the second building had been hit, and the planes were 767’s filled with passengers and plenty of gas.  Realization flooded in and hit us both at the same time, as we knew instantly this was an attack, not an accident.  

     Back then, each room had TV’s to run Channel 1 news programs in the morning, but the cable was out.  We weren’t able to get CNN for some time, but when we did, the rest of the day was made up of students and teachers witnessing the unimaginable together.  The Pentagon is hit.  Another plane crash in the remote fields of Pennsylvania.The reports of children being moved from their schools seeing “birds on fire.”  (In reality they were people who were eighty-plus stories up, making the awful choice to jump rather than burn to death).  Each of the Twin Towers collapsing, falling in on themselves, with unknown numbers of people still inside.  More reports of the passengers of United 93 confronting the hijackers and avoiding a crash into either the Capitol Building or White House.

     I continued to look out the window into the skies, wondering what the next target would be.  My mind raced to my wife, who was teaching across the field at Taft School, and my two children at daycare.  Some students were dismissed, and we wondered if school would be cancelled.  Many of us wondered whether we should leave and tend to our families, but of course we had a job to do, and taking care of the students in front of us was top priority.  By the time I got home, the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness was overwhelming, and I am not a person prone to those feelings.  To this day, describing how it felt to witness all of this in real time does not do it justice.

     Fast forward twenty years.  For good or bad, we are leaving Afghanistan, the training center for the people responsible for these attacks.  The students that I shared September 11th with are now close to forty years old.  We are currently dealing with a world-wide pandemic, and the politics are very divisive.  The same day that I realized my current students were not alive for 9/11 was the day that I realized that they have never known world without terrorism.  Or a world without TSA screenings.  Or without Homeland Security.  Or just the feeling of constant surveillance and fear.  I was a child in the 70’s, spent my high school years in the 80’s, and was a young adult in the 90’s.  I took for granted how good life was and how happy we all were.  I won’t say we didn’t have bad news or traumatic events.  But the scope of 9/11 and the changes that occurred as a result will always be a mile marker in our history, much like Pearl Harbor or the JFK assassination.  People always remember where they were on those days.  Shadows that we can’t seem to escape from.  

     I give a great deal of credit to the United States for how it reacted. The feeling of unity across the country and the world was stronger than I had felt in my entire life (something I wish had lasted longer).  We fought back and we rebuilt.  Heroes signed up to find the people responsible, and spent decades carrying out their objectives.  We rebuilt on the site of the Twin Towers, a new tower 1,776 feet tall (fitting!).  We got back on airplanes because that’s what you do when someone tries to scare you into not.  We teach those that weren’t there to the best of our ability, knowing full well we can’t do it justice.  

     Forgive and forget is not something we will ever accomplish regarding 9/11, and I’m not sure that we ever should. But we continue to try and change the world, doing our best, and, at some point, we can hopefully move on from the unforgettable.