9-11: A Different Kind of Throwback Thursday

One of my formers, on this 13^th anniversary of 9-11, posted on Facebook, asking what we were doing that awful day. I was in my second year of my counseling gig at the high school. Obviously, not a topic covered in Counselor School. The news came in that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. To be honest, the thought of terrorism occurred only fleetingly to me (I tend to the naive when it comes to bad things), but I did wonder how such a terrible mistake could have happened. After calling Carolyn to tell her to turn on the TV, I gravitated to a television in Chris Ventimiglia's classroom, just in time to see the second plane hit the other tower, and then I knew that the inconceivable had happened, which was quickly confirmed by subsequent events.

For reasons I still don’t get, the district and/or middle school administration tried, more or less successfully I guess, to quarantine information from their building. Delaying information does not change the information itself and I, at least, was confident that the staff was more than competent to help kids make sense of it all. Postponing the bad news for 5 hours changed nothing and deprived students and staff of a chance to work together to share grief and knowledge.

But I had my own kids to worry about, so other than a shrug and shake, I moved on, from classroom to classroom. I don’t recall any kids being overtly traumatized, although my daughter was. (Then living in Ohio, she spent most the morning on the phone with Carolyn and didn’t fly for several years.) I do remember telling kids, “Your life has just changed forever, and in ways you can’t imagine. You may not see it right away, but your life now will be very different than it would have been yesterday.”

    As I watched President Bush address the nation, I remember thinking, “Maybe the right guy did get elected.” His speech made me calm, confident and comfortable; despite my misgivings about him politically, he seemed, well, presidential. Of course, I didn’t know he would move beyond a hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan to a conquest of Iraq, a country which, as an enemy of Bin Laden, clearly had had nothing to do with the horror of 9-11. Despite my words of warning to our students, I could not envision how widespread the chaotic fall of dominoes would become. But on that day, all of that was as inconceivable as terrorists flying airliners into the WTC.