story4625.xml

story4625.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

On the morning of September 11, I had my first two English classes of ninth grade students in the Taylor Allderdice High School library for orientation. At the end of the orientation at about 9:55, I was on my way back to my classroom to prepare for my senior classes when I heard the library aide talking to someone on the phone about a plane that had been hijacked. Nothing to get too excited about, I thought; unfortunately, plane hijackings had become fairly common events in our world. I wondered where this one had occurred, but I was not concerned enough to investigate further. I assumed I would get the details later on the news.
After spending a free period in my room, I greeted the first senior student Steve Schuffert who arrived, as usual, well before the rest of the kids. Now Steve is a kidder, but when he said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, I knew he was serious and not making up a story just for the shock effect. I could not believe that something like this could happen, but when the students showed up for class, I knew that whatever I had planned for the day would have to be saved for another time. Most of the students had heard, and some had even seen on TV, some of the events of the morning, unlike myself.
After hearing their speculation that Arab terrorists were behind it all, I did my best to counteract their dismay and anger by pointing out that we had thought the same about the Oklahoma City bombing and that even if it was Arabs who had done it, not all Muslims were extremists and wished us harm. Still, resentment was high, and many of the boys, especially, were ready to seek revenge on whoever had done this evil deed. In fact, revenge and their willingness to fight for the USA became a theme in the rest of the senior classes that I met later that afternoon, although by that time, many of the students had been picked up by their parents or had left school on their own.
Allderdice High School is located in a section of Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill which has a large Jewish population. Because of the circumstances and the uncertainty about what exactly was transpiring, many parents were alarmed that our high school could have been a target, also. We had recently experienced a multiple killing of ethnic minority members in Pittsburgh, and people were fearful, this time of something larger and much more sinister that we needed to guard against. As a result, by the end of the school day, most of the students had gone home.
At lunch in the faculty room, we were in a daze and confused about how to cope with this tragedy. We heard about the son of one of the teachers who attended college in Manhattan and how he had witnessed some of the effects of the attack. He had called his mom and told her that he was going to stay with a friend to Brooklyn for a while, until he thought it was OK to return to his dorm. The events were just so staggering that it took all of our fortitude to survive until the end of the school day at 2:17 when the buses arrived to pick up the few remaining kids.
When I got home, I collapsed in front of the television to view the events for the first time. How could someone hate our country so much that they would plan and execute such a plan? What kind of people were they? How could such a thing happen without our intelligence agencies knowing about it? I know that some political extremists are willing to die for a cause, and I know the mindset of certain enemies of the US; however, I felt at that time and still do, that whatever it takes to protect our people must be done, both militarily and politically. We cannot allow ourselves to be so vulnerable to attack again.