story62.xml

story62.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-02-18

I was carpooling with a colleague. I'd been busy gettiing ready for work and I had no idea what was going on. As we drove away my friend told me what was going on, or at least what it seemed had happened. He had said that apparently a plane had hit one of the trade center towers, and as he was watching the news another appeared to have hit the secnd tower. We had the radio on, and they were talking to someone at the pentagon, who was saying there were rumors of an evacuation. The reports from the pentgon were highly contradictory. We were skeptical--we were on guard against media hype and didn't want to jump to conclusions. We bothremembered how the media were blaming "Arabs" in the early stages of the Oklahoma City bombing. By the time we had walked to our office we were hearing other reports, including that the petagon had been hit and was on fire, and that downton DC wa under attack. But we couldn't get any hard news--all the news websites were tied up, and the TVs couldn't get any reception, since we weren't on a cable circuit and didn't have an antenna

I was co-teaching a class that morning, and my fellow teacher had a cell phone, She was calling her house every five minutes and getting updates from her husband, who was watching TV. We heard that one of the towers had fallen, and that there had been a bomb on the Mall. We decided to let class go, as we had several students who had family members either at the pentagon or downtown in DC. We felt like we had to caution them not to jump to conclusions, not to cast a lot of blame till more was known. When we walked in to the clss we tried to get the TV to work, but no dice--the students said they had already tried. Interestingly, a couple of them seemed to have little or no idea what had happened. We let the class go about 10:45, after reiterating what reports we had heard. I drove home with my co-teacher, who kept the cell phone going almost the whole time. We were both pretty anxious--I had been unable to contact my wife, who works at the CIA, and I kept checking for news of an attack there. Turns out they were evacuating, and it took her forever just to get out of the parking lot.

After that we were glued to the TV and the web, just like everyone else. My co-teacher and I both felt like we had to get right back into teaching our course, so we did, but we also cautioned the students, again, not to jump to conclusions and blame the wrong people. We expected sharp anti arab backlash, but in retrospect, we didn't see it among our students