Recollections of 9/11
See if you share my reaction reading these excerpts from a Blaze article, containing quotations from some of the staff there about their memories of 9/11:
Jason Howerton, Deputy Managing Editor
Like millions of Americans, I remember exactly where I was when I saw the first images of the 9/11 World Trade Center terror attack. Though I first learned of the attack from my middle school teachers, it wasn’t until I returned home and turned on the TV that I was exposed to the images that, unbeknownst to me at the time, would be forever seared into my mind.
. . . .
Jon Street, Assistant Editor
Fourteen years ago this morning, I sat in sixth grade science class having little idea of what the World Trade Center even was, much less the Pentagon.
. . . .
Erica Ritz, Assistant Editor
9/11 profoundly changed all of our lives. I was just 11 years old and living in Minnesota at the time, and to be honest, I didn’t even know what the twin towers were. But I knew what the coordinated crashes meant — we were under attack.
. . . .
Liz Klimas, Science, Health and Tech Editor
I’ll admit it. I played hooky on Sept. 11, 2001. Instead of sitting at my high school desk awaiting what was most likely a lesson in the difference between mitosis and meiosis (didn’t everyone’s science teacher hammer than one into their brains?), I had decided earlier that morning that I didn’t feel quite 100 percent to head to class and somehow convinced my mother to agree.
I realized something reading these excerpts.
I’m old. Or at least, a lot older than I was in 2001.
Our daughter was around on September 11, 2001. Our son wasn’t born yet. As they replayed the footage of that second plane crashing into the South Tower, our daughter — then 19 months old — pointed at the TV and smiled and said: “AIRpane!!” She had recently learned the word and delighted in pointing one out every time she saw one.
She’s now a sophomore in high school.
For a remembrance from someone more my age, I recommend this post from Dan McLaughlin, the Baseball Crank. I met him in NYC some time back, but I don’t think I realized he had narrowly missed being in the North Tower when that first plane hit. And there is always Allahpundit’s set of Twitter recollections, which I read again today.
Soon enough, we’ll be reading recollections from bloggers and editors who weren’t alive that day, but remember what their mom and dad told them about it.
And so it goes.