20 Years On ...

Many of you, my friends, have read my story of Sept 11 over the years when I repost my experience from that day. It was a horrible day.

This year, I reflect upon that day again. The flight that day that strikes me the most is Flight 93. The one where the passengers overtook the hijackers and crashed the plane in Pennsylvania. 

The plane I was on was in the air at the same time as those planes. I wonder what I would have done if my plane was headed towards a target. It is impossible to know. I was on a Delta flight from Atlanta to Chicago that left the same time as the hijacked planes. The passengers on my plane had no idea what was happening elsewhere. What if the plane was being hijacked to crash into the Sears Tower? Would we have known? Would the pilot have tried to tell us? What would we have done? Would we have been so brave and patriotic? I wish I could say yes. I would like to say I would have been brave and helped to crash a plane. 

I like to think that the passengers on my flight would have been as brave as those on Flight 93. My flight landed. I was grounded for several days. What I remember most after the initial shock and terror was how our country came together. Once I got back to my home in Atlanta, we bought an American flag and flew it proudly every day. I bought American flag pins - fancy Swarovski and others - that I wore proudly on my clothes for more than a year. I had to travel to Manhattan for work every week and wept at the sight of the blue lights streaking into the sky where the Twin Towers were supposed to be. I despised the terrorists and what they did to our country. I knew people who worked at the World Trade Center and they were all suddenly gone - whoosh. In the blink of an eye.

So much has changed since then. September 11 set the stage for governmental lies, even more so than during Watergate, which was the event in the 1970s that prompted me to go into journalism. Distrust in our government has grown, even though we all trusted it right after Sept 11. Today, we cannot pull our country together in the face of an enemy that is quite different from the hijackers - a deadly virus that we all should be fighting

I am sad. I am heartbroken. I still feel the togetherness we had after Sept 11 and mourn for that togetherness today. Can we get it back? I am hopeful we will although it may not be in my lifetime. As someone who studied hIstory, I understand that it moves in cycles. Our country has been divided and broken before, as it is now. I wish for us to have a collective reality. I wish for us to have common facts. I wish for my fellow citizens to be able to critically think to avoid being brainwashed. I wish for an updated Fairness Doctrine that will enable citizens to hear different points of view on the media.

Wishing won’t make it happen, however. We have to vote, to elect principled people and leaders who tell the truth and not simply say what they think voters want to hear. We need to get involved at the local level and push for ethics in government and in corporations. We should love our neighbors and not fight or argue with them. We should welcome and help the disadvantaged and those impacted by poverty. 

In many ways, the pandemic is this generation’s 9/11. Our mass trauma is similar to that in 2001. Let’s pull it together and fight on together. We are one. We should be united.