As the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks approaches, many bloggers are posting about that fateful day in American history. Here is my story.
In order to make sense of my reaction to the events of September 11 2001, you need to know how the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two years earlier, affected me.
In April 1999, my husband, my eight-month-old daughter and I lived in a quiet neighborhood in Littleton, Colorado, about 12 miles south of downtown Denver. I commuted into the city every day for work at a software company named Columbine (after the Colorado state flower). Our organization employed 300 people on the top floors of a high-rise office building. One afternoon as I came back from lunch with several co-workers, there were HR and security people from my company in the building lobby asking, “Do you have kids who go to Columbine High School, or know anyone who does? There has been a shooting.” As I rode up in the elevator to the 41st floor, I thought of my best friend Cindy from kindergarten and her teenaged children who attended Columbine, and hoped they were okay.
By the time I got to my desk, people were saying there were 20 or 30 dead kids in the school, with the shooters still inside. The local news stations had information about the situation on their websites, but the stories were conflicting and the information kept changing as the afternoon wore on. All news outlets were showing live footage of kids coming out of school with their hands up over their heads.
We did not know what was going on – who were the shooters, why Columbine, what happened to school being a safe place to be?
When I arrived at my daughter’s daycare center later that day, she was the only child left in the entire building, which normally had about 75 kids in their care. All of the other parents had come to get their children early. The center was located just 5 miles from the scene of the high school massacre, but the thought never crossed my mind that my daughter might be unsafe or scared where she was. I had complete trust in the center director and the staff to take care of my child.
After my daughter went to bed for the night, I switched on the TV to see the latest news. My reaction to this event was completely the opposite of what I experienced in April 1995, when a bomb detonated in Oklahoma City. The tragedy claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. I could not watch any of that TV coverage after an image of a first responder with a burned child in his arms came across the screen. I burst into tears and turned the TV off, not wanting to know any more.
The news on TV that April evening reported that 12 students, one teacher and the two student shooters were dead, and that many more kids were wounded. Unlike the OKC bombing, this was
real; this happened in
my city, this affected people
I knew. It took several days before I found out that my friend Cindy’s children had just left campus when the shooting started.
I did a very unusual thing on Friday Sept 21: I went to 8:30am Mass at the church we attended on Sundays. I guess I was looking for some comfort in the familiar prayers and rituals in a world that was no longer the same. It was an all-school Mass that morning, so all the K-8 students in their school uniforms were in attendance at the service. Looking at all those innocent kids, some of whom had friends at the neighboring school where the shootings had occurred, I just cried and cried through the entire Mass. I was trying to make sense of it all. My world had changed, and the places I believed were safe and secure, were no longer.
For the next three weeks, I read everything I could get my hands on, about all the victims and the school – I cried daily on the bus to work, until all the victims had been laid to rest.
The tragedy did not affect my husband in the same way. He was blissfully unaware that the shooting noises from the video game he was playing on the computer in our home office might bother me. When I pointed out that what he was doing was inappropriate, offensive and disrespectful, given what had happened JUST A FEW MILES FROM OUR HOME, he was annoyed.
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Fast forward to Sept 11 2001: My husband, my now three-year-old daughter and I lived in the same quiet neighborhood in Littleton. I had changed jobs after Y2K and now worked from home for a small telecommunications company run by my college buddy. When I was dropping our daughter off at daycare around 8am on that fateful day, the teacher in the preschool room was upset by a report that a plane had crashed into the world trade center in New York City. I turned the radio on in the car on the short drive back home. The news reports said a plane had indeed crashed into one of the twin towers… and then all programming was interrupted by the announcement that a second plane had hit the second tower.
Remembering the televised images from Oklahoma City and Columbine, I never turned the TV on at home that day, but I checked the national news websites for still pictures and reports of what was happening. I was not affected by this event like I was by Columbine; the news seemed to be happening in a place so far removed from me and from all the things I loved. I did not have the unsettled fearful feeling I had when Columbine occurred. My boss called to say he was not sure what was going on, but that the country might be under attack, and we should seriously consider withdrawing several hundred dollars in cash from the bank, filling up our cars with gasoline, and expect the government to take over all the communication systems and financial networks in the country. I spoke to my husband over the phone – he was watching the events of the day unfold on the TV in the lunchroom at the cable TV company where he worked. My husband thought my boss was over-reacting, so we did not do as he advised. I had one telephone conversation with one customer in Worland, Wyoming that day. The client and I agreed that we were glad to be living in the land-locked part of the country, with minimal risk of a terrorist attack.
President George Bush (the second) gave a speech to the nation on the evening of Sept 11, and again on Sept 20. I did not have much respect for President Bush at the time, but I was proud of him and his words about the strength and resilience of our country in those public appearances. I did tune into the evening news on Sept 11, watching reports from ground zero in New York City. There were stories of trapped people calling from cell phones, which gave us hope that there were survivors to yet to find.
In the following days, my husband, who keeps up with national and international affairs better than I do, explained the political reasons that the Muslim extremists hated the US and all we stood for. My boss was worried that US citizens of middle-eastern descent would be rounded up and detained in work camps, like the Japanese were after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. My boss’s father was one of those American citizens of Japanese ancestry who was sent to a work camp as a teenager.
I remember the sky being so clear and blue in Colorado over the next few days – the tragedy that had befallen our country did not seem real, except for the fact that there were no airplanes in the sky for several days. Occasionally a military jet or two would break the airspace silence, and it was startling to hear that noise. I imagined that people in the early 1900’s were as startled by the sound of something in the sky as I was, nearly 100 years later.
People seemed nicer to each other in the weeks that followed. Automobile traffic moved more slowly, but smoothly, as people were more kind and let other drivers merge into their lane. People held doors for each other and said “thank you” more often than before.
Finally, I remember driving my car and stopping at a busy intersection near our home, to let a fire truck go screaming past. The rig had two huge US flags attached to the back, waving furiously in the wind. I thought that unusual for a moment or two, until the significance of the flags on the fire truck hit me, like a ton of bricks: They were there to honor their fallen firefighter comrades on the east coast. “Oh yeah,” I remember thinking, “Those events, thousands of miles away, would have an effect on firefighters everywhere, even here in safe, sane Littleton, Colorado.”
