I try not to tell "my story" about what happened in my life on 9/11, because very thankfully I was not personally impacted by the event. Nobody in my family and nobody we knew were in the buildings or in the planes on that day. I'm also told that my experience doesn't matter, because I was 10 years old and in my 2nd week of 5th grade when the attacks happened. I beg to differ.
I've been watching MSNBC all day, a direct habit of the attacks. I never watched cable news faithfully until I got home from school on 9/11. Earlier this morning, one of the pundits (Chris Matthews, I believe) said that Osama bin Laden's death had a large impact on college students because we were in that phase of growing up where the world makes its mark on you just as the attacks happened. Howard Fineman was just on Chris Matthews' show saying something similar to that point, that college students today really only knew the world from 9/11 and afterwards. He also said that it had an even bigger impact on those of us who were 10-15 years old and growing up in the DC/NYC area when it happened.
They're right, we do only know the world post-9/11. Let me tell you a little about what happened that day. It's funny, in a way. You don't remember that you need toilet paper until it's too late, but you can remember the most insignificant details of tragic or really important days. My brain went into record mode that day, apparently.
I grew up in Woodbridge, Virginia, a diverse suburb of Washington DC full of people who aren't from there. Most people who live in the area worked in Washington DC, either through the military or the government. I was 10 years old and in my second week of 5th grade that Tuesday morning. We had our DARE lesson right at the beginning of the school day -- 8:45AM. The Prince William County police officer started our lesson and we worked in the DARE workbook for a little while. Around 9:00 AM (I remember because we were supposed to have a fire drill at that time...VA schools are obsessed with them and I hate them), the officer's beeper went off, and he left for a few minutes. He came back to the class with a strange look on his face, and whispered something to our teacher. She looked rattled, then he left and we did some other work.
Our class' lunch time was around 11 AM, and they announced sometime before we went to lunch that the building was on lockdown and that there would be no outdoor recess today. After lunch was supposed to be our recess, but instead the teacher dug up a video for us to watch. She turned on the VCR, then the TV. The TV was still tuned to CNN, but because the VCR was on (and CNN was ch. 6), the screen was really fuzzy. I saw "~~~~~~~~ under attack," but couldn't read the first word. I asked what it said, and she said "ah it's nothing" and put on the video about pandas.
Dismissal was at 3:15 PM, and about ten minutes before we were let out, the principal came on the PA system and made a really long announcement. She told us that there had been an accident in Washington DC, and that they checked and all of our parents were okay. They told us that if we stayed home alone after school, that we should go to a trusted neighbor's house until our parents came home. They let us go, and I went to the after-school hellish daycare program (called SAC) they held in the gym. Almost as soon as I put my bookbag down, my mom said "Dennis!" and signed me out to go home. I kept asking her what was going on, and she said she'd tell me once we got out of earshot of everyone else.
She told me, and I was clueless. She told me the World Trade Center had been struck by planes and destroyed. She told me there was another crash in DC, and one in Pennsylvania. I didn't know what the WTC was, and didn't comprehend what it meant for all those planes to crash at once. We got home and she turned on the TV for the first time. The very first image I saw was from someone walking down a road nearby Ground Zero a few minutes after the second tower fell. It was dark from the cloud of dust in the air, the road was covered in almost a foot of debris and paper and dust, everything and everyone was white, and all you could hear was the occasional paper flutter and the "beeeeoooweeeeoop" of the PASS devices firefighters wear.
We watched the news for a while, then I went upstairs to my room. It was a nice day by the time I went up there...not a cloud in the sky, mid 70s, a little breezy. My window was open and I turned on the TV to see what else was on. The only channels not covering the attack was Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. I flipped through the channels and saw that school was closed for September 12th.
That night, I didn't eat dinner (my mom even made my favorite). I was too nervous. I heard an airplane and freaked out, my mom told me it was nothing. Then she heard it. We looked out and there were two fighter jets flying over towards the north, towards DC.
From that day on, nothing was the same. The world was different. I watched the news constantly. The threat of terrorism was always there, and extra real because we were so close to DC. The anthrax attacks a month later made me paranoid beyond belief. It screwed with me, and still makes me a little nervous when I'm in an airplane and someone gets up to go to the bathroom, or when I'm in a building taller than a few floors. The thing is, I was a lucky one. There are lots of kids in our county who lost family on the planes or in the Pentagon that day.
September 11th radically changed our lives, whether or not we show it, whether or not we were impacted directly, and especially for those of us who grew up near DC or NYC. We grew up with the constant threat of terrorism. Osama bin Laden dying was a major milestone in our lives, because he embodied that nasty change in the world that we saw at that critical time of growing up. If you wonder why so many college students flooded the streets to cheer this death, think about how, when and where these kids grew up, and what they grew up with, before passing judgement on them.