Even though this is four days late...
I have been watching an old comedy blog site where a man who lives in Brooklyn talks about what happens in the world every day in a very Jon Stewart kind of way. Well I came along the week of 9-11-06 and he talked about what he where he
was that day. It was the very first episode where he decided to take on a very serious manner and dedicate that episode to it. After watching it, I started to think about where I was that day.
I remember sitting in school in seventh grade and no one saying anything different than normal...but I knew something was wrong. My history teacher had a perpetual look on his face...I don't know how to describe it, but it wasn't right. On the bus ride home, the bus always stopped by the high school to pick up the high schoolers and then continue on with the bus ride. My brother was in high school then, and I was friends with a few of his friends. One of our mutual friends came up to my window and asked if I knew what happened. I said no, and asked her to tell me, she told me that my brother would tell me. When he got on the bus, I could see the same expression in his face that I saw in my history teacher's. I asked him what happened and the only thing he said to me the whole ride home was, "You don't know?...I'll tell you when we get home." I sat there, impatiently, wanting to know what was wrong, but still happy in my ignorance. As we arrived home the first thing my brother did was turn on the tv. The news was on, this was strange because it was 3pm on a week day and usually it was a soap opera or cartoon or something to that effect. As I watched the first glipses of video clips of a burning building in New York, my brother then explained to me that somebody hijacked two planes and crashed them into the Two Towers in New York. We just sat there, watching the nausiating video of the planes crashing into the buildings, and the buildings collapsing, again and again. We just watched in silence and cried.
Mama had us go do our homework.
The next day our teachers told us that the reason we were no informed was because they did not want us in a panic about it the rest of the day. (Bull shit, they just don't know how to tell teenagers that there was just a terrorist attack.) When I got to my history class (my favorite class) he had the news on, all it was about was the attack. He would intermediatly answer questions, comfort crying people, and say a few comments. As I watched the news features, we started to see close ups of things falling from building that looked like debri. I remember the news caster woman was crying, she said "we thought it was debri at first, but it turns out its people jumping from the buildings." It struck a chord in me and I just pulled my sweatshirt over my face and cried.
Today, after thinking about these things, I started looking up video clips from the attacks, I started remembering the bits and pieces of thoughts that went through my head as I saw these things the first time. Bannana peel, remembering what it looked like when the first tower collapsed. Snow, remembering the smoke clouds moving as fast and as hard as tsunami. Then I watched a youtube collage video that included the same clip that I saw the day after 9-11 in my history class. It struck the same chord, but instead, this time it struck harder and deeper. I began to cry harder than I ever had on the subject of 9-11. I realized, they stopped showing those clips very early on because people want to detatch themselves from the pain and sorrow that reaps from it. But also, because if we watch it over and over, we in turn become numb to it, and think nothing of it.
Think something of it today...If 9-11 passed you by this year without you feeling too much sorrow, watch
this.
