Yesterday, like many other people, I thought about 9/11. This year I thought about it a lot. It weighed on me, and wouldn't go away, even when I turned off the television. Every year since 2001 there has has been some strong awareness of the day, but this year was different. I think that finally I really, really got it.
Because so much emphasis has been put on wherever we were when the towers fell, the entire story of it has a direct and lasting impact in the context of our lives. I could understand that the connection to Pearl Harbor is because it was a direct attack on our unsuspecting country. The big difference for me was that the insanity of it felt more real than ever before.
When I learned about the World Trade Center, I was not an adult. I was a very impressionable teenager, sitting in a classroom in high school. I didn't even know what the World Trade Center was until the morning that we were watching everything fall apart in Manhattan. Though now I would look at this as a launching place for learning, in 2001, I felt embarrassed that I hadn't even had awareness about the Twin Towers. That whole day made me wonder about the thousands of other things I didn't know about the world.
People who worked in skyscrapers in Manhattan were hard for me to place at first, but I quickly realized these people were just like me. Americans going to their jobs, casually saying good bye to their families, boarding planes. This is what rattled our security. And seeing those images over and over and over again is sickening and horrifying.
I was still in that stage in my life where I was beginning to suspect that adult life wasn't all that I had made it up to be, and that maybe you really could be the president and not know what to do. And buildings really couldn't protect you, and planes really did get hijacked four times over. When I still couldn't understand it, I still put it in the hands of adults, and then tried to get my mind around the idea of death in the first place, and the huge numbers of deaths that were so instantaneous. Numbers alone overwhelmed me on 9/11.
For ten years, I think I believed this was my experience alone, but now I can see that there are many people my age who knew about this in high school, and will eventually be in charge of directly explaining this story to everyone else. I wonder if we can do it properly. When we were seeing the towers fall, I was not seeing it as an adult. And it feels like a noticeable difference.
I went to a memorial service in Northfield for the victims of 9/11 yesterday with my dad. It was simple and well done. I knew some of the police officers from a job I had one summer at the police station, and a wave of gratitude fell over me again when I thought about the people who ran up the stairs in New York when everyone else was running down them. I took cues from the people who ran the service and noted how they paid tribute to those who died without sensationalizing the wrong thing.
In addition to this, I couldn't help but see yesterday's memorials through the eyes of a teacher because I'm always wondering how I would share a certain thing well. Unbiased yet personal, factual yet human. The students I teach this year were 2 and 3 on 9/11. Some of them know the story of 9/11 and some of them don't. And that is no criticism to parents. It is a tough topic, and one that I have qualms about expressing as well. Yesterday in the paper I came across advice to parents on how to talk about 9/11 to different age groups and I read it. Thoroughly.
In general I haven't had much to say about the conversation that kids today have more things to be anxious about. I try to temper that with earlier times and earlier stress that people just might not be thinking about (high mortality rate alone reconstructing families six times over in colonial days) and without my own kids this feels removed. But I'm starting to think about people who are younger than me, and what their experience has been in the last ten years.
And I'm starting to change my mind.
Students share real fears with me about their parents who are deployed, and we all wait with them for the deployment to be over, and for them to come back. I've had to explain the rigidity of airport security to everyone very carefully when we talk about going to D.C., and then help them calm down when we're in our seats on the plane and they're scared about making it there.
It's the same with lockdowns at school too. They get under their desks very quickly and I systematically shut down MY bad memories of the first time that was real to me in 1999 and I lock us in. But there are always a few students who need to talk about the WHY of it later on.
I always explain that in the last ten years people have been more knowledgeable about how to keep people safe. We are learning skills that help us in tough situations. Teachers do everything they can to protect students. I WANT to add that I pray for them in moments when they are scared, but I can't officially do that, so I just pray more instead.
It could be argued that tough things that make us anxious just get to us faster. Technology in our hands makes us accessible to all things in the world, and there are good and bad consequences. These sorts of things dawned on me though when I was casually explaining what the airport was like before security got so tight, and their faces registered that much shock.
I've been thinking about how I'm not that much older than them, but the moments when I wrestled certain fears to the ground came when I was 20, not 5. They are in a different world if they had an early childhood experience in the last 10 years, and I can see that you do get to different conclusions when you talk about these experiences in recent American history.
All I can conclude right now is that it's really interesting to think about and be around.
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