My 9/11/01

I will always remember 9/11/01. I was 12 years old and a student at a middle school in Columbus, Ohio. It started out as a perfectly normal day in school. Then late in the morning we started to hear rumors about some kind of attacks. Some of the over-imaginative boys announced that a “war was starting”, as it turned out, not completely incorrect statements. For a while the teachers couldn’t add much information to help alleviate the confusion. Within a couple of hours it had been concluded that the nation had been victimized by terrorist attacks. We were told that there was nothing to be afraid of, but I don’t think any of us kids were completely convinced. There was just too much anxiety in the air. Fortunately all passenger aircraft had been immediately ordered out of sky, so there was never the sound of airliners overhead to scare us even more.  

I remember a teacher announcing that we might be sent home, then an hour later another teacher stating that we wouldn’t. We students spent the whole day in our classes basically theorizing on who the terrorists were, and what they could be trying to accomplish. I think that the only thing school taught us that day was what it is like to live through the country’s first major historical event in our short lifetimes.

When I got home from school, I saw on TV all of the horror of the attacks. It was the first, and to this day the only time when I felt unsafe, and threatened by people from other countries. As I watched the coverage on TV, I imagined myself being held hostage in the aircrafts as they crashed into the buildings. I envisioned myself high in the Twin Towers, being trapped above the fire, and then having the building collapse out from under me and my falling to my death. For a girl of 12, such thoughts were truly nightmarish. In fact, I could only take an hour or so of the revulsion, then I had to do something -anything- else.

A few days later there was another event that took place in my school’s hallway. It was a warm, mid-September day and one of the students, a boy who I think was named Agith, was pushed out of line at a drinking fountain by another student. I do not know anything of Agith’s ethnic background other than he was dark-skinned and probably not of European descent. I recall the assaulting boy saying something like “you people are terrorists and don’t deserve water.” But the bully did not stay on his feet long. A few seconds later he was knocked to the corridor floor by an irate student named Theo, a kid who lived in my neighborhood, two blocks down the street. I remember very clearly Theo standing over the bully and angrily muttering, “the only terrorist around here is you.” Theo was incensed and I know that he did not intend to utter anything ironically profound, but in afterthought, he did, that’s exactly what he did.