I just wrote an essay about my experience during the time of the September 11 attacks, because for some reason, fifteen Septembers afterward, it seems more significant than years past.
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After I posted the essay, a friend with a teen-aged son responded, “In the same place. I tried to share that moment with my son in the car on Sunday.”
It was very poignant. I have not stopped to think about all the children who cannot know what life was like before international terrorism, high-level airport security checks, our growing suspicion of things we cannot understand.
I was at my desk at Kansas State University that morning, and not long after the first plane struck the tower, a colleague poked his head into my office to tell me a jet had run into the World Trade Center.
The comment evoked the image of some small prop plane impaled on the side of one of those massive twin towers.
Of course, that was entirely the wrong image, and not long afterwards, I was crushed into a small office with a crowd of other agitated people, watching an old television on a cart as the second tower crumpled like it was made of nothing but sand and dust, blown down by a breeze.
I am not a jingoistic American. I am not a patriot, but I did feel very united in grief and fear at that time with the nation in shared shock.
I recall the night skies devoid of twinkling jet lights travelling across the carpet of stars. I flew not long after September 11, and can still feel the confusion and desperation at the airports I passed through on my journey.
I also recall the outpouring of love and care each person felt for those who lost somebody.
But from that love, and gush of empathy as a great leveller, we have birthed a world afraid of itself, and that makes me grieve afresh for the children and teens who know life no different; who have absorbed the word terrorism as easily into their lexicon as smart phone.
There are not answers here. What happened fifteen years ago will likely not affect choices we make in Moree each day, or Gurley, Boggabilla, or Bellata.
We get on with our lives, and remember that day in 2001 as the striking image of a city beneath a growing plume of smoke. The day we learnt all of us are vulnerable, and all of use have the capacity to care.
Maybe the takeaway is not to forget.
-Michèle Jedlicka, editor
