Is this for real?
That's what I was thinking, as I watched it happen on the TV.
CNN.
Back then, even CNN was amazing, bringing news of the world in live time.
No more reading about it in the newspaper or waiting for the evening news, now just tune in and see the latest.
The strange thing is, most of the kids I work with, were only five or six years old when the towers came down.
Don't remember it hardly, or don't know the consequences of the event.
These kids grew up in a world of daily terrorism reports from around the world.
Suicide bombings, cars exploding in shopping plazas and night clubs, random shootings.
Daily events, happen so frequently it almost fails to be news anymore, reported so often, it just is.
The gravity of these events, the affect on humanity and actual people becomes lessened as it becomes a part of our daily lives.
To some extent, it is the media, and the way these conflicts are presented, almost as entertainment, at fault.
Is Entertainment Tonight news, or is it entertainment?
No matter, give them their iPods and their headphones and they can dance their way through an Imminent Threat Alert.
Even when showed images or video of the towers burning, they have to ask if it was real.
I have to admit, I sometimes wondered if it was real, as I sat there and watched the towers collapse.
Surreal it was.
It still is.
The people running from and being caught by the dust cloud, it seemed like some pyroclastic volcanic eruption, everything swept away and covered in ash.
Like something from a disaster movie.
These kids cannot relate to or identify with an event that even we could not believe was happening, as we watched in real time.
They didn't live(not really) through the heightened security, the public suspicion, the racial profiling that unrolled in the aftermath.
It became part of their lives.
It would seem like things are back to pre 9/11 days, unless you count the airport screenings and hysteria over discarded boxes and backpacks and monitoring of communications.
News travels a little faster now with networking and text messaging.
In some ways, making the world a safer place.
Sort of.
Despite the veil of security in which we live today, I'll keep reliving that morning ten years ago.
If only to try to make the kids understand.
They need to understand what it was liked when the free world was rocked and brought to its knees by an unthinkable act, an act in which unsuspecting people became casualties in a war thought to be too far from our shores to be of any danger.
Have I mentioned Pearl Harbor yet?
Maybe if the kids can comprehend what happened in their backyard 70 years ago, they can begin to understand 9/11.
Then they can begin to see why no one ever wants to see something like that happen again.
3 comments:
I was at Boeing in Everett that day. As you might imagine, since all of the weapons were Boeing airplanes, the shock and outrage were palpable. As one Boeing manager stated; "we were attacked with the products of our own industry."
Then it turns out they learned to fly in Florida.
We did not know about Florida that day; all we knew was that all four planes were built by Boeing in the USA. It hurt real bad; even me, the guy that didn't work FOR Boeing. Two of the planes rolled out less than 500 feet from where we sat. The othe two were built 40 miles away. Ultimately, that event led to my arrival in Texas from my home in Washington. For several years before going home again...
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