It was the 8 o’clock hour, September 11, 2001, a Tuesday. I had just turned from U.S. 254 to 37th and Hillside streets on my way to work at the old Sedgwick County Dept. of Aging site. I was still driving my black Neon then.
The radio was at 105.3. I don’t remember the name of the station. I was listening to a syndicated radio show broadcast out of Dallas, Texas, “Kidd Craddick in the Morning” when the star host read from a news item that had just come over the wire. A plane hit one of Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York.
I thought what a terrible accident that was. A minute later, Kidd Craddick announced that a second plane had hit the other tower, and I knew it wasn’t an accident.
Upon arriving at the office, I told my co-workers. They hadn’t heard what happened. There
wasn’t a lot of sadness displayed at that moment, just shock and disbelief.
Minutes later, I was sitting in my cubicle when I took a call from my then wife, Maria. She had called my work. We didn’t own cell phones yet.
“Did you hear what happened?” she said, crying, crying into the phone.
Yes, I told her. I had heard and it was terrible.
“I’m scared.” she said. “What’s going to happen next?”
I was uncertain too, but I tried to console her. “Whatever happens, we’ll be okay. If it will make you feel better and safer, go to your mom’s house...This will pass.”
Maria was around nine months pregnant. “Our baby will never know what it was like before the attack.”
Nearly every day, I went to the homes of area senior citizens to assess them for services like housekeeping and in-home care. Maria begged me -- “Please don’t go out today. Stay in the office.”
I told her I would stay put at the office. But I didn’t.
I wanted to prove to myself that I was a trooper. While my coworkers were watching news reports on TV, I left for an old lady’s house.
While talking to the woman, I listened to her radio in the background, playing continuous news coverage of what had become four tragic events -- the two attacks on the WTC, a plane striking the Pentagon and a plane crash in a Pennsylvania field that we would later find out was intended for the Pentagon. Some incredibly brave people gave their lives to prevent that disaster.
Back at the office, I saw where the county had installed a forum for employees to express their thoughts on the tragedies. This was before Facebook.
A man who identified himself as an officer at the Sedgwick County Jail said inmates were laughing and making fun of what had happened. “Sick f---s!” the man wrote. A woman responded, “I understand your outrage, but language.”
I wrote something about how we had to keep cool heads and let the justice system do its job. A lot of people wrote about how the foreign terrorists hated America, our freedoms and way of life. I wrote something along those lines too and while there is some truth to that, the hatred against the United States had much deeper roots. There was resentment in the Middle East of the U.S. support of Israel, its military presence in the Middle East and its support of countries like India, Russia and Mongolia that were committing atrocities against Muslims.
With our toxic divisions in the U.S. today, it seems unreal that this country would even have a pretense of unity and togetherness. But in the days and weeks following 9-11, people were flying miniature American flags on their cars, members of both parties from the U.S. Congress and Senate spontaneously broke into “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capital and Jay Leno turned serious on The Tonight Show. “There are no Republicans and Democrats anymore,” he said.
It didn’t take long for us to forget, for public opinion and the government to get nasty. Twenty years later, they say our country is more divided than at any time since the Civil War.
I saw the first signs of this mentality the day of the tragedies. Someone wrote about a co-worker, a Muslim woman, growing so upset from the bullying she was getting in the office that she left work for her house.
That evening, I watched the news with my wife and her family. My father-in-law would see a woman on TV, wearing a hijab, and say, “There’s one. Kill her.”
I just watched the TV in horror. People a thousand or more feet in the air jumping to their deaths. Those images disturb me still. The rest of us have no idea what kind of hell the victims suffered through, and I hope we never do.
The evil unleashed that day, I felt and still feel, was the work of fanatics. I wasn’t going to scapegoat the entire Islamic religion. I’m not one to attack or disrespect another person’s belief.
But panic, irrationality, hatred and cruelty, I believe are the sad legacies of 9-11. The death and destruction was pointless. We thought we’d value life more, become better Americans, better people. But we didn’t. Maybe that would be asking too much. Perhaps our reaction over the last 20 years is simply human.
All these years later, domestic terrorism is a bigger threat than foreign terrorism.
Prior to 9-11, I never heard my father-in-law talk about politics. After 9-11, it was all he talked about. He became addicted to Fox News. Democrats? They hated their country and were in bed with Islamic terrorists.
I don’t want anyone to think I hate, or dislike my ex-father-in-law. He’s a good man, but he’s not without his prejudices. There’s a lot about him I respect, but on some matters, I believe he’s misguided.
A lot of people on the left and right are misguided. In my view, when you call someone on Facebook a “fucking idiot” because you disagree with them, you’ve discredited and undermined your own argument.
This morning I sat in front of a computer in my hometown library. I looked at the pictures of the 9-11 victims and read a few of their mini-biographies on the memorial sites. For heaven’s sake, in a country fraught with polarization, let’s not forget them.
There they were. I read their birth dates, amazed by how young their faces looked. There was a picture of an 11-year-old boy. He would be over 30 now. I haven’t been to any memorials; I haven’t contemplated the victims in years, I’m sorry to say. But at that moment in the library, I became more emotional than I was expecting.
In their memory, can’t we all be a little nicer to each other?
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