I was eleven years old when it happened. “Something bad happened to these important buildings far far away ,” our teachers told us. “We just heard it on the radio, but hopefully everything is fine. Do not worry.” Because I went to a Zionistic Yeshivah, most of the news we heard was about Israel. There was ALWAYS something going on there, and after a while it was hard to act surprised. We all looked at each other, thinking this was another story about Israel, and wondered when class was going to resume.
Minutes later, students were being pulled out of class and leaving school with their parents. My sister and I were picked up soon after. Going into the car, I wondered where the smoke and flying debris were coming from. My mother turned on the radio, but music did not play. Every channel was relaying the same message; "Planes have crashed into the World Trade Centers, and into the Pentagon. An indefinite number of people are dead, and many are injured. " I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and back then I didn’t really understand the multitude of these events. Being an eleven year old, I was just ecstatic that I was going to have a day off from school.
When we got back to our house, and turned on the television, every channel was showing the same images; the towers burning, people running in horror, and firemen and policemen at work. The medium of television, with the combination of pictures and audio, affected me greater than the radio. When I saw the look of horror in my mother’s eyes I knew that this was not just a day off from school. This day would change everything.
As time progressed, our country became unified like never before. We all watched the same news, read the same stories in newspapers, and basically knew the same information about this catastrophe. It was very hard for us to grasp the concept that terrorists struck on our own homeland. We are ethnocentric in our ways, and we believe that nothing can touch us. What left an impression on me were the scenes of terrified faces, the screaming civilians, and the interviews with families or friends of the deceased. My mother was at the Towers the morning earlier. Three thousand people were not as lucky as her.
*all pictures are from http://911.navexpress.com/
Obviously 9/11 effected citizens across america as well as the citizens of the world. I find the intensity of the average New Yorker's experience of 9/11 compared with the rest of the country very interesting. I'm from Madison, Wisconsin and was about 13 at the time. I remember one of the kids in my class starting a riot screaming at my teacher, "there's a national crisis happening right now! you have to turn on the f-ing television!!" For some reason my middle school didn't want to take any sort of a stance on the attacks until all information had been covered and established. compare that to any other kid's experience like yours living in the city and we had a VERY different day. nobody left school in wisconsin and we all missed the coverage that day. But after we knew what had happened i dont think a single one of my classes ran as normal for at least a month. we were half way across the country but literally every kid in every one of my classes was personally touched or connected to a victim of the 9/11 attacks. The distance translated to a delayed reaction and much less intense experience for me, personally, in the Midwest. I can't even begin to imagine how i would have handled seeing ash and debris in my home town at such a young age.
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