Twenty years. I will, at least as long as I have all of my mental faculties, remember September 11, 2001, for the rest of my life. With time, some of the finer details of the day have slipped from my memory, but I remember I had just started my third year of law school. The prior summer had been particularly shitty for me as my first love broke my heart, and I was glad to be getting back into a "normal" routine. I lived fairly close to my law school and walked to class daily. On Tuesday mornings, I had an 8 am class, so I usually got up at about 7AM central time, showered, watched TV, or listened to the radio for a bit, then walked to class. That day I was running late so I never did end up watching TV in the morning. This was long before smartphones gave instant news alerts, so I had no idea what was happening that morning until I got into class. Someone who had driven to school mentioned something about a bombing on the East Coast. Of course, everything had just started out east, so nobody knew what was happening. I distinctly remember that when I walked in the law school's front door, I noticed many people looking at the monitor that usually just displayed school announcements. There was rarely anything important on the monitor, especially early in the semester, and I did not even bother to look at the screen, but I made a mental note to check them out after class. Of course, looking back, what happened was that someone had switched the monitors to one of the TV stations, and people were looking at the north tower of the World Trade Center, which was on fire with smoke billowing out of it.
I remember that my professor ended class early. He ended it about 20 minutes into the usual hour and fifteen-minute class. I guess he was either looking at one of the news websites at the podium in the front of the room, or he got a message from the school administration saying classes were canceled. Since I did not have class again until the afternoon, I was going to walk back home, and this time, I looked at the monitor in the hallway and saw both of the Twin Towers on fire. I did not have to read the crawl on the screen to know it was terrorism. I quickly returned home, turned on the TV, and watched for hours until finally meeting my mom for dinner later that night. I started watching the coverage right about the time the Pentagon was hit and was still trying to figure out what was going on from the coverage. I remember one of the anchors on whatever network I was watching saying something like approximately 50,000 people could be in the World Trade Center buildings and hundreds of thousands of people could be in or around the World Trade Center complex on any given day. It was not long after that the first tower fell, and I remember thinking to myself, how many people did I just watch die on live TV? Since I was still trying to put together when this all started, I had no idea if people had been evacuated. Then, of course, everything went from bad to worse as the second tower fell, the side of the Pentagon collapsed, and we learned that another plane had crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
I watch the 9/11 documentaries almost every year because I want to remember that day and the people who lost their lives, especially those who did so trying to save others. It saddens me to think that we are a more divided nation now than we were back then, and if a similar attack were to happen in 2021, the country would not come close to the unity that we had on September 12, 2001. While I was never in any danger that day watching everything play out from my living room and thankfully did not know anyone personally who died or had loved ones die that day, the stories of the people in the buildings and on the planes always get to me, even two decades later. I am always especially touched by the story of the passengers on Flight 93, who found out what was really happening with the hijacked planes and made a stand against the hijackers, knowing that it would likely cost them their lives. I hope never to be in a position to have to make a decision like that, but I also hope that if I am, I will be able to do the same kind of thing that they did.
So, this day, like every anniversary of 9/11, my heart goes out to the people who lost their lives and to the loved ones they left behind. Never forget.
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