story1693.xml

story1693.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-03

Having just moved to Springfield, MO from San Francisco, CA in mid-July of 2001, I was looking for a job. I had just arrived at my then 2 1/2 year old son's new daycare center, La Petite Academy for his first day there so I could go on a job interview. As I was checking him in, the director of the center asked me if I had heard that an airplane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that it must have been a terrible accident with a small private jet. After leaving the the daycare center, I tuned my car radio to NPR, and of course I soon found out that it was not a small aircraft, but a commercial airliner. I couldn't imagine how such an "accident" could happen, and of course I soon understood that it was no accident. As I was driving on to my destination, I heard that a second airliner had gone into the other WTC tower. It is impossible to express my shock and disbelief. I will never forget that day, and I will forever think of it as the day our way of life here in the United States was irreversibly changed forever. I am sad for my child, and for all American children, that their future will be so very different from the past that their parents and grandparents enjoyed. I believe our way of life has been forever changed, although we have yet to experience all of those changes as they will not come all at once, but gradually.

I do not say "the world changed" on September 11, 2001. The world did not change. What changed is that now we are more like the rest of the world than we were on September 10th. We were like innocents before then, thinking we couldn't be touched here at home. That isn't really true either, because I don't think we ever really thought about it at all. It never occurred to us that something like that would or could happen to us -- not here at home on our own soil. It was unthinkable. It still is.