One of the lawyers rushed in and told us to turn on the TV. We did, just in time to watch the second plane hit.
At first, we weren't sure we'd seen what we'd seen, but as CBS replayed it and began analyzing it, and then more reports of hijacked jets came in, and the Pentagon was hit, we realized this was big stuff.
We all stood around the small set, watching. When the towers tumbled, my coworker gasped. "All of those people," one of them exclaimed.
"All of those firefighters," I murmured. Being married to a firefighter, I knew who was climbing the stairs while everyone else was fleeing.
The lawyers closed the doors and sent us home. Everyone in the small county seat headed home. My husband was out with his father installing a septic tank, and I had no way to reach him. This was 2001, after all - and he didn't have a cellphone. I wasn't even sure where he was.
I walked into my quiet, empty home and turned the TV on. I sat for hours, watching over and over as the towers burned and then fell, again and again in replays. I listened to stunned announcers try to make sense of this attack on us, heard their voices falter, heard them try to distinguish facts from guesses.
My husband did not come home until about 4 p.m., a little early for him. Someone had seen them working and stopped and told them the country was under attack. My husband and father-in-law had packed up and came home.
So, my firefighter saw the towers collapse in a replay, but he did not see it real time. He did not know, at the moment he was watching, the exact minute he was watching, that people were dying. By the time he watched the towers fall, those folks had been dead for hours.
He was devasted, of course, by the loss of his New York brothers. Firefighters are a close-knit group. Losing 343 of them in one blow was tragic.
But I had seen it happen in real time, along with millions of other people.
Every year since then, I have hunted up footage of the fall of the towers around 9/11. I have watched numerous documentaries about it, seen the conspiracy theory videos, or a lot of them anyway, and occasionally stumble upon some recently uploaded footage someone in New York shot out of a window and then forgot about it.
Different angles of the second plane hitting are always gut-wrenching. I've only seen a few shots of the first plane hitting; no one knew it was coming, after all, so cameras weren't pointed there. However, there is one video that shows the first plane hit; an interview some blocks away, and they heard the plane suddenly come in and the videographer caught the moment of impact.
You can see that here at about 19 seconds in:
In the days after, I remember seeing blue skies unmarred by the trails of aircraft, because the planes were grounded. It was eerie to look up and see the sky so blue without the chem trails of planes, the crisscross patterns that indicated people were going on about their day, flying hither and yon without a care.
People were quiet, at first, and helpful, at first. But after a few days, the air changed. I felt anger, hatred, and evil seething in the store when I went after groceries. It has ebbed and flowed over the last 21 years, that feeling that I have when I am in a crowd, but it has never gone away, not since September 12, 2001. For a day - maybe two - we were one nation, pulled together by the horror of what we'd witnessed.
But after that? We were an angry, scared bunch of people, and we've stayed that way. We frayed. We pulled apart. And the distance and the turmoil grew, and in the end, the terrorists won after all, for all that they've been dead for 20 years.
In the end, they destroyed us - because we have destroyed ourselves.
We've raised an entire generation in that atmosphere of fear and hate. They don't know anything except fear and hate. That's all they know.
What has it been like for them, growing up in this new world that we allowed to happen, the one where everyone is afraid, and big men must carry guns with little, deadly bullets to compensate for their fears?
I know what it has been like for me to live in this time - it's been basically an ulcer-creating atmosphere. But what must it be like for those young folks, the ones who are now turning 21?
What do they think and feel, having grown up every moment with this disease of the soul, this dark pall that has fallen over this nation?
I remember the blue skies on September 12. I looked up at the blue, blue skies, those brilliant September skies.
And the memories of what we were before, knowing what we could have been, and the thought of those clear blue skies, are what pulls me through.
I have often had this same thought, that the terrorists won by bringing fear into our protected, sheltered world and dividing us. We now know just a portion of the kind of fear, anger, stress, and hate many in other parts of the world have lived with for generations.
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