On September 11th, 2001, I was seventeen years and four days old.
Being six feet tall, a popular class presidential candidate, twirling the keys to my birthday gift in the juniors’ parking lot on my left index finger, I strode, as usual, through the hallways, though with an especially remarkable jaunt, on to my second period AP US History class. In a few moments the significance of the coincidence of my wearing a red, white and blue-checkered shirt that day would set in. Class started as it had many times before. Homework was called for and passed the front–I didn’t budge. Quick questions were asked for one extra credit point each—I didn’t budge. The lecture began. I leaned forward and opened my eyes wide enough to feign tuning in as I tuned completely out. For months I had been uninterested in what the overpaid blow-hard at the front of the room had to say. The textbook he lauded was sanitized to sterility, his lecture-style pedantic and prosaic—an accomplishment, plus I couldn’t usually focus due to the yet subsiding high of speeding forty miles per hour over the limit on winding back roads perfect for a teenager to test his theory of invincibility before the first period bell.
A few minutes later, a call came, interrupted and stopped the lecture and all normal proceedings at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, FL for the rest of the school day. The television in the classroom became a moment-to-moment situation room portal as all of us became analysts, pundits and worried about what had happened and what would happen soon. My recollection of that day is as clear to me as the back of my hand is now. The blurriness surrounds the decisions made before my eyes and at a distance behind the backs of the whole of the American and international general public. The soon to be incessant loop of a plane colliding into a building had immediately provoked me to perform the kind of thinking the class I was in was designed to evoke.
When I heard air travel over the US had been prohibited (except for members of a certain family), the school’s decision to lock all parking lot gates and allow students to leave only with parental escort seemed no less stupid though at least consistent with national protocol. What if a child’s parents were out of town (my mother was in Washington DC for business in a hotel across the street from the Pentagon and father worked in another county) and could not come for their children? What if a child’s parents were in town and worked for government agencies (my mother work for the Department of Revenue of the State of Florida and father worked for a public school) and could not leave their domains? Many times by that point, I had heard being calm, aware and rational would see a person as successfully as possible through any situation. Why, I wondered, did the immediate actions of those in authority from the municipal to the federal levels of public service seem hyper, non-communicative and irrational?
That question and many others, I have set before my-self since that fateful day.
The answers are still coming… (To be continued)
