9/11

VIEWPOINT

My 9/11

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor I ’m almost sure I’ve told this story before, but even if I have, it bears repeating. We’ve all got our “9/11 story”… those of us old enough to remember it anyway. It’s hard to believe you can now have not been born when the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks took place and be old enough to vote, buy alcohol, go to the casino, serve in the military. In fact, some of the folks who weren’t even born when 9/11 happened have kids of their own.

Yes, it was a very different world in 2001 from the world we are living in today, but it was a seemingly random Tuesday morning and I was asleep. At the time, I was working at Southland Greyhound Park (which of course, doesn’t even race greyhounds anymore) and we had done a double-header card on Monday so I was pretty tired and snoozing merrily along when the phone rang. It was my wife.

“Are you watching TV?” she asked. I assured her I was not. It was an odd question to be sure and I was still in the fuzziness of sleep, so it seemed even stranger.

“We’re under attack,” she said solemnly. Who was under attack? The school? My wife was teaching English at West Junior High at the time and remember, this was not that long after Columbine and Jonesboro West Side (remember when school shootings were both uncommon and shocking?), so that was the first thing that came to mind.

“America,” she said. By this time, I was fumbling for the TV remote. As the picture came into view I saw thick black smoke coming from one of the Twin Towers. One thing that clicked in my head about how serious this was came when I saw the little “HBO” symbol in the bottom right corner of the screen. In case you never thought about it, HBO doesn’t have news on it, so this was clearly a big deal.

I don’t remember the rest of our conversation, but I do remember the second plane hitting the second tower and the realization – along with the rest of the world – that this was no freak accident. This was most decidedly on purpose. I sat there glued in place the rest of the morning as the now-familiar events unfolded … the plane crashing into the Pentagon … the plane crashing into the field in Pennsylvania … the wild conjecture about what this was and who was responsible and what would come next.

The planes were all grounded. Then-President George W. Bush spoke to the nation. The confusion and concern swirled. I got a day off from work. With no clue about what might happen next, a lot of things got cancelled, including sporting events and such. The whole country went on lockdown.

That was 23 years ago today. It was a tragedy unlike any we had ever seen. There was no Facebook back then. The only real social media at the time was made up of chat rooms and online bulletin boards, so we didn’t really have a way to reach out and share our anger and grief.

What we did do, though, was gather and pray. We put out American flags. We put aside many of our petty differences (for a while) and became the “united” United States again. Eventually, we figured out who had done this to us and we exacted revenge. What we didn’t do, though, was hold on to that “united” feeling. At the time, we pledged to “Never forget!” Nowadays, we’re more divided than ever, and we have, it seems, forgotten.

Whatever bonds that tragedy forged have become brittle in our American society and I don’t know what, if anything could fix it.

A powerful symbol of that broken bond is one of the central figures from the 9/11 story. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. As mayor, Giuliani galvanized not only the people of New York, but the nation itself in the wake of the attacks. Slowly, however, all of that good will admiration wasted away as he became a caricature of himself and a poster boy for all of the division that crept back into our mindset. Today, he’s the punchline to a joke no one is laughing at, an unfortunate metaphor for where our society has gone in the two decades removed from that tragic day. Not since, perhaps the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Era, maybe not since the Civil War, have we seen our nation so divided along philosophical, political and economic lines.

But we can, and we should, try to recapture that feeling of unity. It shouldn’t take a tragedy like a terrorist attack to being us together. For this generation coming up now, they’ll all remember 2020 for the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe that will be their common drawing point. Somehow, the terrible loss of 1.2 million Americans, how to respond to it, even the vaccinations that are being used to fight it, seemed to do more to tear us further apart rather than bring us together, but that is in an America still being run by old men and old women who have been in power for far too long.

They are nearing the end of their time. This emerging generation, whose resolves were tempered by the tragedy of 9/11 and whose resilience was tested and forged in the despair of the COVID-19 pandemic, will be taking the helm soon enough. “Maybe not in time for you and me,” as Stevie Wonder once sang, but I hope before the 30th anniversary of 9/11 they find a way to pull this nation back together.