nmah5015.xml

nmah5015.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-16

I was late for work on September 11, 2001 because one of my children was sick and we weren't sure if he would be able to go to school. Just as I was about to leave the house to head for work, my mother-in-law called and told me to turn on the television. The second plane had already hit the WTC, and details were very sketchy. The general consensus was that it was a terrorist attack, but at that point nobody really knew what kind of planes were involved. I went on to work, and by the time I got there, all my co-workers were aware what had happened. The initial shock quickly escalated to fear as my thoughts at the time were something like, "If they would do something like this, is there anything they won't do?"
At 1,300 miles away from Lower Manhatten, I believed that I was relatively safe in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but the fear was still very real as we listened to continuing reports and heard that other planes were involved. Knowing that any number of thousands of commercial airliners were still in the air, I couldn't help but worry that this was only the beginning of a broad series of hijackings that could ultimately result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. It was a very though day as we waited and waited to find out what would happen next.
As bad as it turned out to be, I still felt that we had gotten off lucky. If the planes had hit the towers later in the day, thirty or forty stories lower, the losses could have been so much greater. And if the people on Flight 93 had not learned of the events of the day, would they have bravely rushed the hijackers, or would they have assumed like the passengers on the other three planes that they would have eventually been brought down with a minimum of loss? How tragic and how devastating would it have been for our country if that plane had made it to Washington? And how may of the cancelled flights that day were to have hijackers on board with more targets in west coast and midwest cities?
Having lost no friends or relatives on September 11, I have to consider myself extremely lucky, but in my own way I joined millions of Americans in feeling the loss as though it had occurred in my own home town. On that day, as I do every day on my job, I spoke with several people in the New York City area, and the horror was evident in their voices. One man named Richie asked me, "Did you hear what they did to us?" My immediate answer to him was, "They did it to all of us, Richie. They did it to every one os us."

My life has changes since September 11, 2001 in that I no longer feel complacent about safety in our country. I still believe that we are strong and have the ability to win the war on terrorism, but I no longer naively believe that we can intercept the terrorists and prevent them from completing their missions. I do believe, however, that the shocking reality of those events have pushed our intelligence agencies to action like never before, and we are increasingly capable of protecing ourselves.

We should remember two things. First, people don't like us. It may be for all the wrong reasons, but we can never forget that many people whose hatred for anyone different is a ticking bomb which we may not be able to diffuse. Second, we should remember that, when the going got tough, our whole country came together like I've never seen before. The statement that the terrorists only made us stronger was more than just a political statement or a rallying cry -- it was the truth.

I probably didn't fly the flag as much as a lot of Americans after September 11, simply because I didn't want to be lumped in with all those who were going a little nuts with it at the time. However, more than a year later, I am happy to see that patriotism is still flying high.