1.
By Neethu Ramchandar
Pretty Pink or Ruby Red? As a sixth grader in New Mexico, this was my hardest life decision.
I was lost within the realms of my faded gray locker and the decision of what lip-gloss to take to class when Bray Key, my classmate and friend, bounded towards me with an unnatural urgency. His freckles and red hair stood inflamed as he hissed through heavy breaths. “Have you seen the news? The Towers are gone!”
I hadn’t seen the news. I didn’t know what towers he was talking about. Although his urgency had not penetrated my sixth grade mentality still silently pondering lip-gloss shades, I followed him and the sea of students through the halls into our classrooms. Inside, students were seated and silent, focused on the television that showed planes crashing into the Twin Towers in New York. I’d never been there, but the silence in the room helped me understand the seriousness of the situation enough to shove the two lip-glosses into my pocket. Today would be neither ruby red or pretty pink.
We watched TV all day and although I could see the people who had died and the ruble accumulating, the destruction seemed so far away; until Turtle started to cry. He was also a classmate, a shy boy who’s real name I never learned. When he walked into class and saw that the crashed planes were from United Airlines, he froze. His face was a shade of white that I’ll never forget. “My- my daddy flies United planes,” he said and ran out of the room. My heart sank and I shoved my hand anxiously into my pocket turning the lip-gloss tubes in my hand wondering if there were any comforting words I could say. Turtle sat in the front office, his knees knocking together in anxiety until his mother came to pick him up. We found out later that Turtle’s father had been scheduled to fly to New York that day but luckily, had been delayed.
As the school day of September 11th came to an end, I headed towards my school bus when a large hand stopped me in the hallway. Frightened, my clenched fist squeezed the lip-gloss tubes into a goopy red mess that covered my pocket and small fist. I kept my hand in my pocket and slowly turned around to face our school’s security guard. “Have the students been nice to you today?” he asked. Of course they had been and I wondered why such a question would be asked.
At home, I repeated the incidence to my mother who explained that in our community there were few minorities and some people may confuse my Indian family and couple us with the terrorist bombings. She pointed at the TV where a man walked away from the fire and smoke with his hands covered in blood. “People at your school will be angry,” my mother said. “They may blame you for what happened. You have to be strong and know that you are a good girl.”
My sixth grade mind slowly wrapped around the events of that day. I wasn’t able to predict the racial slurs or the anger that would follow in the weeks and months after the attack, but as I took my hand out of my pocket and looked at my red lip-gloss stained fingers and then back at the man on TV covered in blood, I finally realized what had happened that day.
2.
By Elliott Kennedy
I will always remember the Cheerios. The way they made a satisfying clatter against the ceramic bowl as my mom poured them from the sunny-colored box. The way they gurgled under the drowning waves of two-percent milk. I had only just filled my spoon with crunchy cereal when the phone rang. I watched my mom casually close the refrigerator door before picking up the receiver. It was my sister, calling from her high school English class. The fleeting conversation that followed was an anxious staccato of one-word sentences.
“Hello? Wait. What? The TV? Why? No… no…”
My mother’s hand rushed to her mouth, as if to stifle a scream, or a sob, or some combination of the two. She hung up the phone with an alarming CRASH! and rushed from the kitchen. I followed her, that first bite of cereal forgotten, obscured by fear and worry. She was in the living room, sitting on the floor, holding the remote control. The wood-paneled television fizzled to life just in time to see the second plane collide with the remaining tower. My mom started to cry. I asked her why she was so sad.
“All those people,” she whispered. “All those people.”
On September 11, 2001, I was eleven years old. I was in the sixth grade and still under the simple impression that college would be the zenith of my existence. I watched Boy Meets World every Friday, went to sleepovers most Saturdays, and was just starting to realize that boys didn’t have cooties. I was young, uninformed, and disinterested in anything that didn’t fit into my narrow tween world. On September 11, 2001, I simply didn’t understand.
I couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the tragedy. My brain couldn’t organize the flow of disturbing information into something coherent and logical. Planes in skyscrapers? Thousands dead? None of it made sense to me. To be sure, I understood that an atrocity had been committed. But until that day, I had only read about such horrors in history books—giving disease-infected blankets to Native Americans, enslaving entire African tribes, murdering millions of Jews with the intent of complete extinction. That degree of evil was a thing of the past… right?
Ten years later, I wonder if the events of September 11, 2001, have been added to textbooks, nestled in the pages among history’s other cruelties. And ten years from now, I wonder if children will read about the attacks with the same naïve view I once held: “That kind of stuff doesn’t happen today.” Or, worse, will they look back on the attacks without a hint of innocence, having become so accustomed to such horrific events?
Ten years later, I have only started to see how that day has impacted my life. For the first few weeks that followed, watching the news became a 24-hour a day activity, as more and more heart-wrenching stories and rumors of war flooded the stations. Months after the terrorist attacks, I continued to hear racial slurs like “towelhead” uttered by both classmates and adults alike, making me question whether America is still welcome to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses. Years later, as I take off my shoes and walk through seemingly endless metal detectors, I still feel a twinge of discomfort when I board a plane, and I always blow a kiss to the wings for good luck.
Because of September 11, 2001, I will never forget the Cheerios. I remember returning to the kitchen table, sounds of the television still blaring in the living room, and simply staring into the bowl, too shocked to eat. I had never before noticed how much they looked like little life preservers.
3.
By Keegan Clements-Housser
I remember looking up at the wall-mounted television screen in my middle school’s office as the news program analyzed the Towers’ collapse over and over again.
Around me, some of the other students who were seeing the footage for the first time – many of them, like me, sleeping or on the road to school when it happened – were crying softly to themselves. The adults working in the office, in contrast, were resigned and quiet; for them, this tragedy was hours-old, and judging by the smeared makeup and red eyes, they had already done their crying.
But there were no tears in my eyes. Grief wasn’t an emotion I was feeling at the time. In fact, as I found my fist clenching while I watched the images of people choosing to leap to their deaths rather than stay in the building, I felt only rage.
Rage at the terrorists who had perverted their faith in such a way that they could justify the murder of thousands as an act of martyrdom. Rage at whatever government agency had failed to protect one of the most important cities in the world. Rage at the passengers on those planes who could have easily overwhelmed the hijackers and saved two towers, if not themselves, and joined the undeniable heroes that combed through Ground Zero for survivors in the annals of history. Most of all, though, rage at the circumstances that had led to this attack.
I remember muttering to myself, “Well, it was about time this happened, I guess.” I also remember ignoring the shocked look on the faces of the two fellow students—girls who sat across from me in math class—who had overheard me as I headed back to a very subdued classroom.
That rage never left me. If anything, it merely deepened in the coming years. I watched, first in horror and then in disgust as our country chose to hand victory to the terrorists. We chose to live in fear, throwing away our civil liberties and launching endless, fruitless wars, all in a desperate attempt to regain a sense of security that had been shattered into a million pieces on that September day. The people of the United States suddenly realized for the first time that we weren’t invincible, and that revelation terrified us.
After all, we are quite the young nation, all things considered. We achieved the status of a superpower in a few short centuries, and in many ways, we never really had time to grow into our shoes. We truly never had felt such a personal loss; unlike the many nations out there who watched on knowingly, their histories heavy with genocides and civil wars and catastrophes beyond the reckoning of our national memory, we didn’t have long histories to work with.
It was, as conflict often is, a catalyst for our nation—a turning point where we learn how to cope with the realities of vulnerability.
Throughout it all, as I grew up in a post-9/11 United States, one thing became increasingly clear to me—ignorance is what caused this whole mess. Ignorance on the part of fundamentalists, cherry-picking their religion, yes. However, it was also ignorance on our part as we chose to think ourselves alone in our grief and completely free of any responsibility for the conditions that lead to the actions of misguided, murderous, would-be martyrs on planes.
Our nation has regularly engaged in exploitative practices, choosing to use and abuse other nations and cultures for the benefit of both ourselves and our allies. We, along with the rest of the western world, have engaged in cultural colonialism, resource stripping, and other uses of our great power without the burden of responsibility.
This is not to say that we are some evil force in this world, or that those who attacked us were at all justified. In fact, quite the opposite—but we have a tendency to rarely admit our mistakes, much less correct them. Our populace regularly equates patriotism with believing that our country can do no wrong, and in doing so, ignoring all the things that we could do better—and all the ways we could turn enemies into friends.
Being an informed populace is our first step in no longer needing to live in fear. We must work to become informed about the world outside our borders; as an informed, worldly nation that has outgrown its adolescent phase, we can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
In order for that to happen, though, we must all do our part. For some, this means picking up the newspaper or looking online for information on world events. For others, it means taking a deep breath and stepping back from political or ideological rhetoric to see how others in the world view things different. For others still, it’s learning how to operate peaceably and cooperatively in an increasingly global world.
For me, that means that ten years after that fateful day, I’m sitting here and writing this as a journalist. I chose to dedicate my professional life to spreading information as far and as wide as I can. That anger is still there, but as I do my best to help inform people, it slowly starts to fade. Perhaps, with time, it will no longer be needed. I can certainly hope.
