| Freshman year of high school, middle of the country. I was walking to English class in passing period and people going in the opposite direction were chattering with excitement about something. I saw a friend and he said, did you hear? They blew up the World Trade Center. He was smiling not with happiness but with like crazy excitement. Then I got to English class where they had a TV set up watching the news coverage and a few other teachers came in with their classes to share the TV. One of them said, there it goes, the whole world’s finance is in that building. The horror of it all didn’t really kick in. Not it sure if that was due to being 14, or due to experiencing it all through TV, or just being kind of a bastard at the time. I feel a lot more sensitive to loss and human life now that I’m older, some of the old footage I’ve seen this week has affected me a lot. Nobody knew anything about it until I got to social studies class where my teacher told us that bin Laden has claimed responsibility but having never heard the name before I thought he was saying “Ben Laden” due to his midwestern pronunciation of the vowel sound, so I was picturing perhaps an Englishman. In science class I remember half of us were trying to convince the teacher that there was no way we could come to school tomorrow. Totally disingenuously. The news reports all suggested nothing would be the same but as a kid from the suburbs far from NYC, everything seemed the same but we had the national anthem going off more often and people started to argue about the wars a couple years later. Only after many years could I see in hindsight how different our path has been from others we all might have taken. |