9/11

Inspired by Mike’s post, I’ve decided to write a bit about 9/11 even though it’s already 9/12. I haven’t written about it on here before, so here it is:

I had just started 4th grade, and had gone to a regular day at school. Then, at around 10 most of the teachers had found out from other teachers they passed in the hallway and who whispered the news. I remember seeing my teacher, Laura find out that 2 planes had hit, which I think is really the turning point from “Accident, or attack?” to “Holy crap we’re under attack.”

Of course, no one told us kids anything. Kids started trickling out of the classrooms after that. The teachers said that we would find out why when we were picked up. I figured I would be picked up soon – I lived right across the street from school. I wasn’t. By lunch there were only about 8 kids in my class left (most of them, I notice now probably lived far away in Brooklyn) and me. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t picked up.

I really got scared when they made us put our heads down in the cafeteria after lunch instead of going outside. Like we’d done something wrong and that this was our punishment. Finally, a teacher called me and took me downstairs and finally I saw my mom, Elo, and Warren. I had a quick burst of excitement – It was Elo and Warren!

But their solemn faces wiped the smile from my face and as we left the school and walked home they wouldn’t say a thing, because “kids could hear things from the windows.” For a second I thought that I had done something wrong that was different than why the other kids were being picked up. Finally, once we crossed the street they told me.

I remember thinking that I didn’t know there were bad guys in real life, and that that only happens in movies and books. But when I got home and turned on the TV it was pretty real. Now I hear everyone saying things like “Post-9/11″ world. But it isn’t a new world. It’s the same world that existed on 9/10/01. The only difference is that we realized we were vulnerable.

But for me, 9/11 was when I started listening to the news. Before 9/11, it was just this thing that my parents did every morning, and watched every night. Now I would watch or listen to the news from the other room when my parents had it on. Then we went into Afghanistan. I remember the irony of dropping food and also dropping bombs (I didn’t yet know that the Taliban were the bad guys, and the Afghanistani people were good.)

So after 9/11 I really was living in a different world. I stopped being a child, and my world went from “home, school, grocery store” to my life and then the rest of the world and everything happening in the newspapers and eventually all the different wars, the Holocaust, Sadam Hussein, how our president wasn’t a role model but instead an idiot, and the real reasons why we’re in Iraq, etc.

There’s some more things I’d like to say – but it can wait another year. Because we’re going to be mourning that day every year for a long, long time.