The Ride Home

I don’t like writing about what I was doing or what I was thinking on 9/11 because I wasn’t in New York, and I didn’t lose anyone in the attacks, and I tend to get a bit irritated with all of the tragedy p0rn I read where people get over-dramatic and try to make it about themselves. But I understand the necessity to discuss feelings and thoughts about the day, though. For our generation, this is our Kennedy assassination. This is our Challenger explosion.

I’ve already written my “what I was doing” post, four years ago, and I don’t really feel like re-hashing it, but I have to write what’s in my head right now because I’ve been feeling increasingly uneasy as the day has progressed.

I can’t really remember much else about that day. Some friends and I were discussing last night where we were when the planes hit, and I seemed to recall that my second class of the day, my Spanish class, was canceled. But I honestly can’t remember for sure. I am inclined to think that it was, because I remember going to the KUC (Keathley University Center, the student center on MTSU’s campus) and gathering with probably 50 other students in the drab, dimly lit room that had TVs and couches and watching the news as everything was unfolding. I remember the low mumbles and sharp whispers as the newscasters announced that the first two planes were hijacked, and then that the Pentagon was hit and the other plane hit the ground in Pennsylvania. I feel like I remember a little later in that same room hearing that this group I had never heard of before called Al-Qaeda was taking responsibility for the attack, and I guess I went home some time after that.

That semester I believe is when I was working my insane schedule of 10-hour days on Mondays and Wednesdays, eight-hour days on Fridays and four-hour days on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because I scheduled all four of my college classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I think I was supposed to be at work at 2 p.m. those days. Since 9/11 happened on a Tuesday, I’m assuming that I went to work later that day, but I don’t remember what it felt like or what anyone said.

I remember watching non-stop news coverage for about a week, alone in my apartment, until I had to turn it off and rest my eyes and my brain. I felt fatigued by everything that I was seeing and feeling until I couldn’t really process what it all meant. I stopped getting upset when I saw images of the destruction, which might have influenced my part in the discussion we had in my Media Ethics class about whether or not we would publish the photos of people jumping out of the burning towers if we were newspaper editors. I said yes. I said I wouldn’t censor the news. I said no matter how bad things get, protecting people from what was really happening would only hurt our society.

I still agree with what I said in class back then. Although, as I sit here watching a 9/11 program on NatGeo, I wonder what I would have said if I’d known anyone who died that day.