Today marks the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Eight years on I can still remember where I was and what was going on when I first heard (heck, I can
still picture it so clearly in my mind).
It was an absolutely
gorgeous fall day, not a cloud in the sky. I was 16, a junior in high school in 2001. I was sitting in chemistry class when I first heard about it, I don't remember what we were doing before or who told my teacher but suddenly we went from our regularly scheduled lesson for the day to wondering if the first reports of a plane hitting the WTC were actually real. No one knew what to believe or what was going on at first and then suddenly we were on lock down and no one was allowed to leave their room, that was about the time a good majority of my class decided to take over our teacher's computer to try to get some answers but literally
EVERY news website or source of news was down because of everyone trying to access it at once. We finally did manage to find one news website that wasn't down and that's when we saw those still photos and knew that those reports were so very real. No one had told us yet what was going on so when another class came into our room they were complaining because no one had told them anything. The spouse of the teacher who taught their class worked in New York and she had left to go try to find out what happened to her husband. Being an hour away from New York means that pretty much all of southwestern Fairfield County is more or less a suburb of New York and many people work in New York but live here as a result of that. We were finally told by our principal what had happened before they finally did let us out of lockdown, everyone was stunned. The next class I had was my civics class and we spent the entire time just listening to the news on the radio in our room silently. There was a computer lab right next door and Abe kept us updated, he was the one to tell us about the second plane that hit, the plane the hit the Pentagon, the plane that crashed in PA and when the towers fell. I don't remember much about what happened between then and the end of the school but I do remember that we had so many kids and teachers in tears or close to hysterics because they didn't know if their husband, wife, sister, brother, mom, dad, cousin, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, ect was safe because they worked in New York and many of them worked in financial offices or businesses that were housed in or near the WTC. Many of them left early that day. The next thing I remember very clearly was sitting in the band room at the end of the day with Secchi letting us talk and talking to us about today and how we'd never forget where we were or what we were doing when we first heard. He said that our memories of today, of where were and what we were doing when we first heard, would be similar to the memories of his generation, they can all tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard that JFK had been assassinated, and he was right. Those memories are so salient, they are flashbulb memories, forever imprinted in your memory.
Another thing that I remember vividly were the pictures of the people stuck at the top floors of the towers and their desperate cries for help that wouldn't be able to reach them. Some grew so desperate that they jumped, death was a certainty in either instant, I'm sure that they knew that but I guess they wanted to choose how they went. This is why we should never forget. We should never forget because we owe it to the nearly 3,000 people who died that day. We may not know any of them personally but no one should be forgotten, especially when they did nothing to deserve to die the way they did.
Never Forget
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serendipity_15
sad
shocked
sleepy
excited
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ontd_political 
nostalgic