The Day the Unthinkable became a Reality – A 9/11 Remembrance

The Day the Unthinkable became a Reality – A 9/11 Remembrance

So many of us will never forget where we were when the news came. My husband and I awoke to a phone call from his brother around 6:00 a.m. and I immediately thought, “Someone must have died.” I was right, of course, but not in any way I could have expected or even imagined.

I remember turning on the TV to see the first plane explode and the first building collapse, and I felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. “I don't want the kids to see this,” I said turning to my husband, already knowing that this was not only a tragedy but a potential media spectacle.
Recalling how I felt that morning I can't help thinking of Auden's lines:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along.

I was sleeping peacefully when people leaped out of windows or called loved ones to say farewell or raced up stairwells to try to save people, and that realization makes me feel strangely guilty and yet lucky at the same time as I think, “There but for an act of fate, go I.”

That morning except for the eerily silent skies—no planes were passing overhead-- we determined to go on as normally as we could. I drove the kids to school, I met a friend for lunch as we had planned, my husband went to work. It was only later after we put the kids to bed that we turned on the television and watched and wept.

America lost more than thousands of lives on 9-11. We lost our innocence and our sense of invulnerability from foreign attack in a way more palpable than any experience since Pearl Harbor.

Many people resolved that such an attack would never happen again on U.S. soil, but I don't believe we can prevent every act of terrorism from occurring, whether it results from the actions of another domestic terrorist like Timothy McVeigh or a foreigner like Mohamed Atta.

Yet I do believe that we can do a great deal more to honor those who have lost their lives, and not just by building another memorial, or reciting a list of names, or standing together in a moment of silence.

Those are all honorable acts, but we are capable of a more profound form of remembrance if we take every opportunity to teach our children not only what happened on September 11th but how strongly we must strive to prevent religious extremism or racial, tribal, or ethnic prejudice from allowing us to forget our common humanity.

The terrible acts of September 11th, 2001 were not simply a strike against Americans but against every citizen of the world. They made the unthinkable a reality, and they diminished our sense of our own decency and regard for the sanctity of every living person. If we take this anniversary as an opportunity to affirm those values as a global community, we can make no better tribute to the lives of those we lost on this day seven years ago.