Every year, I think I’m not going to write about it, but then I start looking back. I look at the pictures people post. The memories of where they were. The footage. This year I came across some of the most intense video of the events of that day you’ve probably never seen. I know I hadn’t:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06cG4Q5fT0k&feature=share?rel=0
And so of course, it got me thinking about my own experience of the day.
I’m a New Yorker. I’m not from the city, but I was born in New York State, and spent half of my childhood there. I’ve always thought of New York as “home”. But upstate New York is, and has been for some time, an economic wasteland. When I was getting ready to graduate from college in 2001, I knew I didn’t want to go back. I was finishing a double major in theology and communications, and I had no idea how I was going to find a job there. I had applied to teach English in Japan with a friend of mine, but when we weren’t both offered the job, we decided to move to Phoenix with another friend who was getting an apartment there.
I arrived in Arizona that June, and had found a job with the phone company by July. It wasn’t the exactly what I was looking for, but it was something, and it paid better than any job I’d had up to that time. The offices were nice, set on an upper floor of one of the city’s skyrises. (As it turns out, it would also be the job where, providentially, I would meet Jamie, my future wife — but that’s a story for another time.) In the end, though, I only lasted about two months. I couldn’t do it. It was a high-pressure sales environment where deceiving customers seemed to be the only way people could hit their expected numbers. I felt that I had no choice but to quit.
I started looking for another job. Started hoping I could find something that was a little closer to my field. Application after application went out, but no luck. Finally, I managed to land an interview with a graphic design company. I remember telling God in prayer that if this job didn’t come through, I was going to take that as a sign that it was time to pack up and head back east and figure out a new plan.
And then, that fateful Tuesday morning, I was in my bed, asleep, when one of my roommates, Eddie, came barreling into the room, not even dressed. He had been in the process of getting ready for work — Arizona being three hours behind East Coast time during the Summer — when the attacks had started.
“Dude!” He yelled. “They’re bombing New York!!”
He ran back into the other room, and I tried to clear my head of sleep and process what he was saying. I followed him into our sparsely furnished living room, where the TV was tuned to the news. I got there about a minute before the second plane hit the South Tower.
He called into work and said he was taking the day. We sat and watched for as long as we could, until everything they were saying was just a repeat. We didn’t speak much, other than to make occasional perplexed exclamations about how this could be happening. I made phone calls to loved ones, and we expressed our mutual shock and dismay. Finally, Eddie and I got dressed and headed down to a local parish where a special Mass was being offered because of the day’s events. It was a huge parish, and it was absolutely packed. It was a pretty amazing thing to see.
On our way home, we were realized we were starving, and so we swung by a little Mexican and grabbed a couple of burritos. We ate them in silence in his car on the way home, listening to more news on the radio.
“It feels so weird to me,” I finally said, “that we’re just sitting here eating burritos, driving down the road, the sun is shining, and everything seems just normal and fine. But it isn’t.” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Later that evening, I headed to a nearby gas station and picked up a copy of the Arizona Republic special edition for the day. The cover read, “TERROR: ‘Thousands’ dead as hijacked jets slam Trade Center, Pentagon”. I still have that newspaper in a box with other memories, just like my grandmother, God rest her soul, had the one she got the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. She never forgot that day, and I’ll never forget 9/11.
A couple days later, I had packed all my things into the back of my beat up old Pontiac station wagon and was ready to head back east. I had checked in with the design company, and they told me that while they had been interested in giving me the job, nobody knew where the economy was going to go. They had put a freeze on new hires until the dust settled. I’d made a deal with God, so I knew what to do. And to be honest, I was aching to go back. I may not have been from the city, but New York — my home — had been attacked, and I wanted to be there.
As I drove across the country with an American flag decal displayed on the inside of my back window, I began noticing how many other cars had flags, too. Every time I saw one, I felt a solidarity that’s hard to express. My car still had New York plates — the old ones, with the Statue of Liberty right in the middle — and I was so proud to be seen with them. Every place I stopped for gas, or for food, there was a sobriety in the air. An unspoken sense that we were all in this together, and that it meant something. The closest thing I can compare it to is being part of a family on a special occasion, or being on a football team during a game. The latter is probably more apt, because family is always family, but when you’re on a team, strangers — guys you may not even like day to day– become your brothers once you’re out on the field. It’s probably why so many young men joined the military right then. They wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves. Something that would take the fight to the enemy and not let it happen again.
What I didn’t realize, driving home over those three days, was what had really changed. The world I grew up in, the childhood spent walking the streets of the small Connecticut town where I spent my elementary school years without supervision, the excitement of the dawn of the digital age, the beloved figures of Ronald Regan as president of the United States and John Paul II as pope, was at an end. Nothing would ever be so sure again. Nothing would ever feel as safe.
Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Jamie would move out to New York, too. A year after that, she moved to Northern Virginia, just outside of DC. Before I could follow her there, and eventually work up the nerve to ask her to marry me, the DC Sniper attacks began. As she walked to the bus stop, or to the Metro, she would wonder if today might be the day that she’d find herself in the crosshairs. Once, when I was visiting her, I was walking along the side of the road, and a white van drove by, just like the one being described by police. Someone leaned out the window and yelled, “BANG!” just as they passed me, and I heard him laughing after I jumped as they drove on.
This became our lives. Our experience. Always wondering when the next thing would come. Always on edge. We have become so accustomed now to metal detectors and security checks and the new misery of flying and the never-ending promise of terrorism that we’re different now. Do you remember what it was like when you could walk loved ones right up to their gate on a day they had to fly, or meet a friend in an airport restaurant for lunch when they were coming through town on a layover?
In a pre-9/11 world, I wonder if we would have been nearly as complacent, as a society, when Black Lives Matter started shooting cops? Would we have been as restrained when neo-fascists became a thing, or when neo-communists started beating people in our streets? Would we have ever seen coming the uncontested demolition of our historical statues and the undisguised suppression of speech? Would we have ever believed that in the aftermath of attack after attack in the name of Allah, we’d be so afraid to say the words “Islamic terror”? Could we have imagined that Europe would willingly surrender itself to becoming a dhimmi state?
The millennials who are largely responsible for the violence in our new domestic protest movements all grew up in this post-9/11 world. If they are 25 today, they were 9 years old when it happened. If they’re 18 today, they were 2 then. They have never known the world I grew up in. They have never known the America of my youth, where people may have disagreed, but they trusted one another to do the right thing, and the most important arguments of childhood seemed to be about which Garbage Pail Kid was better, whether GoBots or Transformers would win in a fight, or when the next Star Wars movie was coming out. We were taught to love our country, not to hate it and everything it was founded to represent. The promotion of a self-loathing society had won small victories then, but when we began refusing to blame the ideologies responsible for such a heinous attack on our homeland because it wasn’t politically correct to do so, I think we crossed a Rubicon.
How will we ever fully understand how this event shaped our children? How it shaped us?
9/11 was a significant moment in the birth of a new era. A new spirit of a new age that pervades everything. As we look now at the state of things, how can we not see how far things have fallen in the sixteen years since? The world is in incredible turmoil, and the Church along with it. The realities we face do not just threaten us, but we are told we cannot even call them by name. Everything we knew has been threatened; much of what protected us has come, like those towers, tumbling down, leaving us permanently changed.
At some point, the dust has to settle. At some point, we have to begin again. Before we can, though, we have to want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves again. Only then can we begin to rebuild.
Please, God, may that day come soon.
I was a junior in high school on September 11, 2011, sitting in 4th period trigonometry class when the principal’s voice came over the PA and explained what happened. In our relatively small, quasi-suburban-but-also-quasi-rural high school, where Internet access was still restricted primarily to teachers’ computers and the library, none of us had any idea what had happened until our teacher turned on the news on the class television following the principal’s announcement. By that time, both towers had collapsed; I remember us sitting in our desks, in total silence, as we watched the panic, the disbelief, the insanity unfolding on before our eyes. The rest of the day passed in much the same manner, none of the teachers actually teaching. And even at my relatively young age, I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “This is it. Nothing will be like it was before. It’s time to grow up.”
This piece, Steve, struck a nerve for me. You reflect so poignantly upon how people in their 20s today were barely alive when 9/11 happened. As a teacher myself, I often find myself asking similar questions: “How do I reach my elementary and high school students, none of whom were even alive or even really know what 9/11 means?” I myself have struggled with how to respond to the trauma of seeing everything I once thought was safe be ripped away in a moment, and I think so many people may age (in their early-to-mid-30s now) feel the same way. It’s as if I have my feet planted in two different worlds: too young to have truly remembered or experienced the Reagan era or the full impact of the JPII papacy, yet too old to be part of the post-9/11 generation. The void had to be filled by something; in my case, that something was a cynical, acerbic attitude married to an almost total lack of trust in institutional leadership of any kind, a sort of “What’s the point?” mentality that led me to the dregs of atheism, relativism, and indifference. It is only through the stability I have found in the classical rite of Mass—even if only online—that I feel I have finally been able to heal, imperfect though I still am.
Days like today cause me to reflect: Just how many others my age are there with the same scars, trying to make sense of a world gone mad, who have not been made aware of Christ’s teachings, His sacraments, His Church? And yet, if I, poor sinner though I am, can find my way to Truth, then surely others can as well.
Impossible life this would be,…without the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
I was in my office in Moscow when an American guy running a company on the floor above burst in to tell me that the Trade Centre had been hit by a plane. I’d never heard of the Trade Centre Towers to be honest and didn’t know what he was talking about. Luckily the business centre where we had our offices had a canteen with a big flat screen TV and I and others spent the next six or seven hours transfixed by the whole thing. I remember it all very clearly.
But I wouldn’t make the 11th September my “dividing line” between an old world and the one we inhabit now. 1989 or 1991 presaged changes just as profound if not more so. I think 28th July 1914 would be the date I would offer.
The American psyche was shattered on this day, which was presaged by not only events in 1914, but also 1789 and 1517.
It certainly was a dividing line for us Americans. Different parts of the world have different significant events, and American society changed dramatically that day. And it’s never been the same.
Yep, I know that.
Nice to see you. Deacon Augustine and Raghn Crow were asking about you too. I’ll email you soon.
USCCB / Vatican / Germany:
It’s all fine. Remember, the environment.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/018/012/Screen_Shot_2015-05-12_at_3.31.31_PM.png
I am a “survivor” of 9/11, nearly perishing under the collapse of the South Tower of the WTC. I saw and heard many people jump to their deaths. It was a horror and it is only through the mercy of God that I am here today. That day was a defining moment in the lives of my daughters who were 11 and 12 at the time. One moment, they were happy kids who had just returned to school and the next thing, the rug had been pulled out from under them. Our story has a happy ending as both their mother and father made it home that day alive. Many did not. However, it helped form an understanding about the world that I never had to make when I was a child. While I saw individual acts of cruelty and violence as I was growing up in NYC, the grandeur of the events of 9/11 far surpassed anything I had experienced. It left an impression which was sealed into their minds vis-à-vis all of the media attention it received. The proliferation of news programs and the politicization of just about everything, together with smart phones and social media, have placed our society in a toxic soup of news – much of it fake or false – opinion and speculation. Day after day, night after night, images and rhetoric have been spreading a message of nihilism, distrust and despair. And, last but most importantly, the kids have been taught BY OUR SOCIETY (as represented by schools which are run by the government and the media) that we deserved this to happen to us. The events of 9/11 have been used for social engineering purposes and have helped to lead us to where were are now, no question. My children were old enough to remember what life was life before 9/11, yet the children of today will not know. However, all is not lost. God is still in His Heaven and Jesus Christ is still the Head of the Church. Regardless of the insanity which seems to be reigning everywhere, most particularly felt in our Church, Jesus remains Present and those who desire Him will hear His Voice. We need to demonstrate through our lives our love for Him and let others know about Him, picking up our Cross daily. The answer is Jesus. Always has been and always will be. He will bring us through this.
I remember exactly what I was doing on 9/11. At work, my manager had the TV on and we saw the first tower being hit on ABC News with Peter Jennings (now deceased). It didn’t really sink in at first – I felt like I was watching a bad movie. I had to leave work for a doctor’s appointment. My sister picked me up from work with Mom and my niece in the car.
When I got to the doctor’s office, they had CNN and KYW radio on surround sound. What on earth is happening? I was sitting in the examination room with the doctor when we heard on the radio about Flight 93.
One of my cousins was actually IN the Pentagon when it was hit. His mom (also my cousin) was a nervous wreck until she heard that he was safe and sound. He survived, unlike the thousands that died that day.
May Our Lord grant eternal rest to their souls and the soul of Archbishop Ambrose Senyshyn, who died September 11, 1976 (9/11/01 was the 25th anniversary of his death; today it’s 41 years).
Postscript: On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, September 14, 2001, our church was packed – even more than on Christmas and Easter. Our then pastor said that the church should always be packed like this, because we should thank God during the good times and not just ask His help when disaster strikes. Even God likes to hear “Thank You.”
Thank you for sharing your experience of that day, Margaret. I am very glad to know that your cousin survived the attack on the Pentagon. Today, September 12, we celebrate the Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary who aided and interceded for us at the Battle of Vienna, defeating the invading Moslems. Though French-sounding, the croissant was originally baked by the Viennese to celebrate the Christian victory over the Moslem invasion. Notice that the croissant is crescent shaped. Our Lady is the one who will crush the head of the serpent, the Lady who is crowned with 12 stars and the moon is beneath her feet. She will once again prevail. Have a blessed day, Margaret.
You’re welcome. We were all on edge until we my cousin called to let us know that he was safe. I have 3 cousins and 2 uncles who serve or have served in the military. My dad couldn’t serve in WWII because of his eyes and feet, so he worked in a factory during WWII.
Also, thank you very much for the info on the croissant! I think I’ll order one now w/ my dinner (they serve breakfast all day). ????
Blessings to you and your family. God willing, we will see the triumph of Our Lady.
Beautifully said. Thank you.
“Jesus remains Present and those who desire Him will hear His Voice.”
This is so true and is vital to remember.
I think that the Rubicon was actually crossed in the late 1960s in the era of Vatican 2
and Woodstock but those of us coming to adulthood in the era of Reagan and Thatcher in the political world and Pope John Paul in the Christian world.perhaps with parents who had avoided radicalisation in the 1960, failed to understand that downward trajectory was already in place and rapidly accelerating…
The “rough beast” its “hour come at last” had already been born…
“I think that the Rubicon was actually crossed in the mid/late 1960s in the era of Vatican 2
and Woodstock…”
Exactly.
Some of us can remember a time when the Catholic Church and the pope were normal, habited nuns were everywhere, abortion was illegal in most places and was never talked about openly, the word “gay” meant “happy,” television and movies were wholesome, divorce was rare, fashions and speech were far more decent, pornography was not rampant, and, generally speaking, people treated one another with a certain level of respect.
By 2001, those days were long gone.
And those who did understand, and who spoke up, were mocked and laughed at. They could still speak, it’s just that no one would listen. I certainly didn’t. I was one of those who had to be mugged by reality.
Yes, the 60’s were a dividing line. Without them, what happened to our country after 9/11 could not have happened. It took 40 years of “Off the pigs” and “Amerika” to get to what happened after 9/11.
Sometime since 9/11 I have realized that it is possible to have four Presidents in a row who are traitors. I have realized that it is possible for the same people who installed those Presidents to install a Pope.
Mr. Skojec, I am about 10 years older than you. The America of my youth in the 70s and 80s was hardly a golden age, but it was comparatively much saner and more normal than what we have now. I also had the feeling, mostly justified I still believe, that adults (however flawed they may have been) were still in charge. That changed decisively when Bill Clinton was elected president. I still cannot believe how fast and how far we have fallen even since then. Given the trajectory we have been on, I can only dread the thought of where we might be in another ten years
England in the 1960’s was the setting for my teenage years. The decade began with Elvis and the lesser successors to Bill Haley et al and ‘progressed’ to the Beatles and “their Satanic Majesties” the Rolling Stones. It was a decade of unrestrained but totally baseless optimism. It was baseless because, save for those few special souls who are gifted with profound spiritual wisdom and prophetic insights, it was impossible to have even the slightest inkling as to what was fermenting, and had been fermenting for many decades beneath the surface. Neither would it ever occur to us to consider such things, because that is the whole, diabolic purpose of unfounded optimism. But now, with hindsight, we can see that 9/11 and everything that has happened since then was already an essential ingredient in the mix. Including the fact that, in the current pontificate, we are seeing the full realisation of the communist strategy to tear down the Catholic Church from within. The complete and terrible unfolding of the Fatima prophecies, no less.
Nothing in politics happens by accident. – FDR
Transformers would win, no question
Your 9/11 experience is almost exactly the same as mine, Steve, except that it was my Mom and not a roommate who came running into my room early in the morning to tell me that “planes were attacking the World Trade Center.” I was in 7th grade at the time and we lived in California. I thought it was fighter jets and I too made it to the living room just in time to watch the second plane hit on TV.
Powerful video. Heartbreaking for so many reasons: for those who lost their lives so horrifically, for the end of the America most of us grew up in, for a moment we can never recover in which the forces of evil marshalled themselves. As a longtime sojurner in the Middle East, I knew exactly what had happened. As a deeply spiritual and religiously literate woman, I knew why. Even so, come Lord Jesus.
How did WTC 7 fall just like the Twin Towers when it wasn’t hit by a plane? Look it up. The US government has not told you what really happen on 9/11, and we are being lied to. As Catholics, it is our duty to reject lies and seek truth–justice demands it.