Remembering 9/11 tonight - I had a lot of thoughts putting this post together tonight. When I was a young kid, I remember learning about John F. Kennedy and my mother mentioning that his assassination was a moment which you remember where you were and what you were doing when you first learned it happened. This is true for every generation and for mine, this moment was surely September 11, 2001. Our country changed forever on that day.
I was in college, in Minnesota at the time. My Junior year, I had an early morning 8 a.m. lab, which I always struggled to wake up for. That morning, well before I had normally gotten up, I woke straight up as though something pressing needed to be done. Strangely, and to this day I can't explain this, that particular morning I woke up well in advance of when I needed to up for the lab that day. It was 7 a.m., and I went downstairs and turned on the news, something I had also never done before. I saw the first reports of a plane striking the North Tower in New York. Those early reports speculated that it might have been a navigation error or some other pilot error, and then in that moment as I watched the reporters continue to broadcast, the second plane appeared and struck the South Tower. I can't put into words, even now 16 years later, how I felt that day, that week, that month, that year. I knew in that very moment that my life and my country would never be the same again.
Now, these years later, I find myself in a classroom teaching young students the skills they need to be successful in this new world. These students have never known the United States before September 11th - what our values were, what our viewpoints were, what our outlook was. They only know our world after that moment. The hate, the fear, the bigotry that quickly followed. The paranoia that has encompassed almost every aspect of our lives has come to dominate the worldview that they witness.
This image here was taken on the 10th anniversary of the attack, and I remember thinking that night when I was shooting this along with about 50 other photographers, that there was something significant about 10th anniversaries. It had felt at the time, like it was a moment of healing, a moment where we had recognized the impact the attack had had on us, but we had perhaps regained our bearings on what our values and viewpoints were. I had thought at the time that there was a promise in the idea of a 10th anniversary that we would return to our ideas of democracy, equality, and freedom before the attack.
6 years later, I am reminded that the legacy of this event in our country is far more complicated and far more transformative than I had given credence to when I shot this image. We recognize this day each and every year. Yet, nearly 20 years on, we still struggle to help the heroes of that day manage the consequences they inherited by responding to our need. Heroes who lost their lives rushing to evacuate people to safety. First responders fighting every day to get health benefits to cover the conditions they received when they ran into the fires and debris of the fallen towers without questioning. The ordinary citizens today who face prejudice and persecution every day because their name or skin-color reminds someone of the people who committed this heinous attack. That day in 2001, the country lost a great deal.
However, the other catastrophe that occurred that day was the beginning of possibly the greater loss of what our country was. The legacy of the attack was the continually increasing denial of our democracy in the response to the attack. Denying our heroes the benefits they deserved. Denying US citizens the rights they earned because of what they looked like. Denying our traditions and values because of fear and hatred.
There was a time when we were better than this. I wholly and truly believe after witnessing what our neighbors can do in the wake of disasters that we can be become the greater USA again.
