story2865.xml

story2865.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

First of all I have to say that I am still in shock and have a sense of disbelief that the attacks on September 11, 2001 happened. I spent time during my college days at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ in the shadow of the Twin Towers. I rode the escalator in the hotel dwarfed by them. I've cried while standing in the square at night, looking up until I couldn't see anything, imagining buildings so immense that at the tops, they must touch a piece of heaven...The idea that they fell is so incredible. The idea that so many lives were lost is unimaginable.
I work for our local community college and our division was having its monthly staff meeting. Someone mentioned that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers; we were dumbfounded, thinking like many others across the nation and the world I am sure, that a pilot had suffered a heart attack, that there was no way someone could "accidentally" fly into such an imposing structure. Never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined what had actually happened. By the time the meeting was finished, the second plane had struck; I tried to get online and had a difficult time. Two co-workers turned on radios, each to a different station, to try and get a sense of what was happening, since we really didn't know the truth. I called my boyfriend and they had a small television tuned in: two planes at the Towers, one at the Pentagon, and one in Pennsylvania. And all on purpose.
The college went on alert, as did our county; some offices closed and some classes were cancelled as people wanted to be with their families, watching the tragedy play out on television. We prayed as volunteer EMT workers from our area headed up the New Jersey Turnpike, wondering what horrors they would find, feeling a sense of fear coupled with pride as we went with them in spirit. I finally got into a news website with streaming content, and as I heard the information, I sat in my office and cried. Cried for the senseless loss of life, cried for the hijackers--death in the name of their god, cried for the friends I couldn't reach by phone or email who worked near the Towers, cried for the country.
I went home and watched one of the major news channels and cried. I stayed up most of the night, watching and crying. Helpless.
I still feel helpless, even though I have heard so many stories of God's intervention that day; one of my dearest friends who works a few blocks from the Towers did not go to work that day because she wasn't feeling well. Her train would have been passing under the first Tower at the time the plane hit it. I know through my Christian belief that God is in everything, and I know that those who lost their lives did not go in vain; we have all heard about the priest who died giving last rites, the firefighters who went up to save others knowing they wouldn't come out, the people who stayed with those who could not leave.
But what have we learned? We learned that the United States, the so-called super power of the western world, is not the impenetrable fortress many felt that it was. We learned that in our "darkest hour", we have friends of all colors, faiths, and beliefs--friends who we (the collective country of America) considered foes. We learned what a portion of the world, too long snubbed and ignored, truly thought/thinks of us. We learned that the United States is a troubled land, as our Arab and Muslim neighbors--the people we greet when we pull into our driveways, the parents of the children who carpool with us, the folks we speak to each day by name at our local diner or gas station or nail salon--were being beaten and threatened.
As we look back one year, I still shed tears.