September 11th, 2001 - An 11-Year Retrospective

 (Author's note: This was a piece written on the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—I have modified it for relevancy for 9/11/2012.)

Can you remember where you were and what you were doing 11 years ago?

Most people can’t, but I can.

Eleven years ago, I was roughly a month into my sophomore year of school at Point Park College. Life was pretty typical at that time: classes, friends, writing articles for the college newspaper, The Globe.

I lived for my friends and going to rock concerts, and went home to visit my family on some weekends. I had one of the most coveted dorm rooms in Lawrence Hall—Room 924—and an awesome roommate to boot.

Yup. Life was pretty sweet back then.

Until I got a phone call that would be a catalyst of change of what my view of the world would be forever.

It was about 9 a.m. when the phone rang. I was lazing around in bed, not wanting to wake up and get ready for class when I got up and picked up the phone. It was my roommate, Casey’s, dad.

He asked where she was, and I told him she was in class. He told me to tell her to call her mother right away, because she was worried about her.

Worried? Why would she be worried? Curious, I asked if something was wrong.

“An airplane just hit the World Trade Center.”

What?!

In disbelief, I turned on the TV and watched the horrific scene unfold. A few minutes later, I watched the second plane smash into the second tower—ON LIVE TELEVISION! Then I began hearing reports about terrorists and the Pentagon and planes flying around Cleveland and Pennsylvania … and so much stuff I could not, did not, or want to comprehend.

I immediately called my mother at work and told the secretary that I needed to speak with her right away, explaining what I just saw. Moments later, she came on the line—her voice calm and collected.

She told me to calm down and to make my peace with God and that she loved me. Later on, she would tell me that she did not know what had happened until right before she got on the phone with me.

Her secretary said to her, “Before you get on the phone, I should let you know that two planes have hit the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon.”

Casey came back to the room a few minutes later looking shocked and she had obviously just found out what had happened. I think for the first time in our young lives, we were seriously faced with the possibility of mortality. What if the planes came here? Pittsburgh was a real, possible target—and we lived smack in the middle of it.

Casey had this huge bottle of Absolut stashed away in her closet and some peach schnapps and orange juice. We figured that if we were going to die, we might as well have a drink before it happens. So she mixed us up some fuzzy navels and we drank as we watched more of the aftermath on TV.

A few hours later, we wandered down the hall to talk to my best friend at the time, Emily, and her roommate Katie. The scene in her room was similar to the one in ours and we all just sat there and reflected on what was happening. By that point, Flight 93 had already made its fatal descent into the slow, rolling hills of Shanksville, PA.

None of us could really leave the dorms; we had no transportation and all of us had family that lived more than 30 miles away. Getting out of Downtown Pittsburgh was impossible and all telephone communications were jammed to capacity. Even cellular phones wouldn’t work right.

So we all just stayed put.

Later on, a group of us decided to take a walk outside and survey what was going on around us. Downtown was literally a ghost town. There was no one out. A few of us flirted with the idea of going to a blood bank and donating some blood—in tragedies, there is always a blood shortage—but I don’t think the blood bank was open at the time.

I came back to my dorm room later on to find a note on the door for me from Residence Life stating that my mother was calling trying to find me and to call her back as soon as possible.

I still have that note to this day.

Later that night, then-President George W. Bush spoke on television and swore that we’d get whoever did this. Let me tell you, I swing to the left very much so…but what that goofball said at that moment made a whole hell of a lot of sense. Conservative or liberal—no matter. We were all on the same team at that moment.

A few days later, in my interviewing and reporting class, all of us still in shock over what happened, we all wrote narratives of what unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001. I still have the original notes and copy I wrote for my narrative, as well as the finished product—a compilation book by the students and our instructor, Bill Moushey.

Months later, in March of 2002, a group of students from 670AM WPPJ traveled to New York City for a radio station conference. One of our stops was the wreckage that was the World Trade Center and the rudimentary memorial that had built up in front of it. The buildings nearby were still covered in dust. I have photographs that I took at the site that still haunt me to this day.

Much has occurred since Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden was found and executed—a phantom spectre for many years whom some of my cynical friends thought at some point wasn’t real. Saddam Hussein was caught and hanged. Thousands upon thousands of civilians and troops died in war and in efforts to stop it. Death has been rampant.

Even the overall moods and attitudes of the general populace has gotten less optimistic and grimmer. People are more paranoid and less peaceful. The price of everything has gone up double, and sometimes threefold. The economy is in a shambles. People are more divided and everything is either black or white, with no shades of grey.

I have friends who have gone “Over There” and have thankfully come back to tell the tale. I have friends that might have to go back and their wives are scared to death that they may not make it back. I have friends “Over There” right now, and I pray that they make it back alive.

Life as we know it has pretty much gotten a little closer to normal since then, but it will never be the same as it once was. You can fix something thats broken, but it will still not work quite as well as before. Our nation is very much like this.

All we can do is evolve and find new paths to be wonderful and great once again.