Dept. of Memory

[kaffy_r]

9/11

I was driving Andy to school, and we had NPR on the radio. A small plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.

By the time I let Andy off at school, we both knew it was much, much worse.

I walked into our newsroom, and I was greeted by one of my colleagues. His face was ashen. He told me the latest rumor; a possible truck bomb outside a Washington government office. That turned out to be wrong, but too much was truly happening.

It was Tuesday, our weekly deadline. Our editors tore up our front pages, all our news pages.

We were sent out to our various Chicago suburban communities, to see and hear what was going on. We contacted our police departments. We talked to people on the streets, in the shopping centers, everywhere. 

I was covering Skokie, IL, at the time. It was a village that was home to a large Jewish community, including a still-large community of Holocaust survivors. Our little police department was covering all the synagogues, because even as the towers still stood, burning, they knew it was terrorism, and they wanted to protect those who might most be in danger. 

I went to the municipal library, where men and women stood in the lobby, watching a television placed high on the wall. One woman was furious; The CIA and FBI should have known this was coming, she said. They fell down on the job. 

I walked across the lawn to Village Hall, to talk to the mayor, a kind and very intelligent man who had been an aide to an Illinois congressman before becoming mayor.

We spoke very quietly. He looked at me and said, "Nothing will ever be the same." 

I went back to the newsroom, wrote up what I'd found, worked the phones, called Bob to make sure he was OK, since he worked, at the time, perilously close to Chicago's downtown. 

After the stories were sent off, we gathered in a corner office to watch the darkness unfold on a tiny black-and-white television. I heard Peter Jennings, rewatching one of the towers pancake, mutter "Dear Lord." I understood.

The world had changed. We knew it. 

Almost 3,000 victims, murdered by desperate and murderously foolish young men.

The echoes and vibrations of those deaths spread across the globe, because we wanted, somehow, to take action against the terror, to enact justice ... to take revenge. 

Hatred begat hatred, began fear, begat courage, began determination to do the right thing, begat confusion commensurate with the inchoate destruction we'd watched. 

Twenty years later, we must care for the living victims; we must look to each other for comfort, and we must extend that comfort to others, next door, across town, in every state, across borders, and around the globe. 

Everything has changed, indeed. May some of that change be positive if at all possible; may our hearts grow larger and our minds grow clearer, and our determination to be decent human beings stronger. 

Comments

[cmcmck]

We were in Siena in Italy on that day although the following year we were in Rome at that time and met a New Yorker who'd been very close at hand indeed to the events.

[kaffy_r]

I think we all can remember where we were on 9/11; many of you in the British Isles similarly remember 7/7. My brother was an RCMP officer serving at the Halifax, N.S., airport, directing and comforting hundreds of confused and fearful people whose planes were rerouted in mid-air to Halifax. The airport, very small, eventually housed 47 planes - even more than the 34 planes sheltered in Gander, NLFD, where "Come From Away" began. 9/11 eventually touched the lives of almost everyone in the world, in some way.

[beccadg]

What's really getting me this year isn't the memories, they've been there 20 years, after all, it's the idea there are adults old enough to drink now with no memory of a pre-9/11 world. You can tell them how you remember it, but that's all you can do.

[kaffy_r]

Time is ruthless like that. Luckily, people like you and I can act as bridges for those young people, to a time they don't remember. We can be their link.

I know that, because when I was growing up, my grandparents, with whom I lived along with my mother and brother, told me stories of the First World War, of my grandfather flying over French and Belgian fields. My mother told me stories of being a teenager during the Second World War, of the family hosting young men who'd trained near our home town, and who would shortly go off to war.

I told those stories to my son, and he now has a link to times and worlds decades in the past. I know he'll tell those stories to his son.

We are all bridges to our past for the young.

[maruad]

There were TVs set up on a 24 hr news station in the cafeteria (they had been there for months before) which was on the same floor as I worked. I kept slipping out to see if there was more news. It was obvious that everything had changed and wasn't going to change back.

[kaffy_r]

Bob and Andy and I stayed up until the wee small hours of the morning, watching everything, hoping for survivors and wondering what shape the world would take in the days to come. You are right; everything changed, and it didn't change back.

[jesse_the_k]

I'm glad to learn that the Skokie police dept understood the possibility of harm to their Jewish residents.

I realized watching TV would be a mistake, so I was glued to NPR as they replaced every music sting with funereal piano music. Added to the long lists of things I'd like to never heard in my head again.

[kaffy_r]

Yeah; Skokie officials have had way too much experience of haters coming into the village, or trying to - Nazis in the 1970s, more Nazis in the late 1980s or early 1990s (I covered that, too), a Neo-Nazi shooting a black Skokie resident to death in front of his kids, anti-semites spray painting Nazi graffiti on a statue honoring the victims of the Holocaust, the evening after it was dedicated.

When I could tear myself away from the television, I listened to two radio stations; our local NPR station (WBEZ) and, of all things, my favorite rock station, WXRT. At the time, it had an award-winning news staff (highly unusual even at the time, and now long gone). The jocks, who were all really lovely, quiet spoken intelligent people, coordinated with the news staff, and kept people informed in a very calming way. I was grateful for what they did.

[a_phoenixdragon]

Yes...this whole thing right here...

I remember it was Michael and I's day off. We were called into our living room by a friend who was crashing at our place and it was just so surreal, I thought for quite a few minutes that it was a joke, or a movie in poor taste, because I just couldn't wrap my mind around it...

*HUGS*

[kaffy_r]

I thought for quite a few minutes that it was a joke, or a movie in poor taste,

It hit so many people that way. So many people remembered thinking what they saw on television had to be a bad movie clip because it was so foreign to our experience.

I think people who directly lived through other hells - WWII, Korea, Haiti's earthquake, the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust - might have more quickly grasped that it was real.

[a_phoenixdragon]

My grandfather was like that...he knew for sure it was real and while it didn't depress him (but galvanized him!) he knew no matter what happened, it would be an epic cock-up. He was of the opinion that MOST wars and police actions were...

[kaffy_r]

Your grandfather sounds like a very wise man.