Where Were You?

Ten years ago tomorrow, where were you?

It’s a question to which every North American over 12 will always know the answer.  Me, I was in med school, sitting in anatomy class, scribbling notes on a regular Tuesday morning.  This was before the days of smartphones, of course, so as long as our class was seated inside the auditorium, we had no idea anything was going on outside.  I was only half-listening when the guest lecturer started the 10 o’clock hour by saying that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center 350 miles away.  I really thought he was opening his presentation with some kind of introductory joke.  But when he requested that we observe a moment of silence, we all started to realize something was not right.  It wasn’t until a number of us headed over to the med school library at break and saw the streaming footage on computers and TV screens that had been set up just for that purpose, surrounded by crying students, that the full impact of what was happening started to hit.  I remember watching, transfixed, and then turning on my heel without a word and running all the way back to my apartment.  Because my dad had been scheduled to be working on a project at the Pentagon that day.  I think I skipped the rest of that morning’s classes as I tried to reach him or anyone else in my family by phone, but all the cell phone networks were down along the entire East Coast and communication was nearly impossible.  It was nightfall by the time I heard that he and the rest of our family were safe.

Of course, I was lucky.   I didn’t lose any close family or friends in the tragedy.  (The closest personal link to me is the heartbreaking disappearance of Dr. Sneha Philip, who was the daughter of family friends and who actually may or may not have died in the attacks.)  I am so grateful to be so lucky that I feel almost disrespectful writing a 9/11 memorial.  But I guess just being a human being (unlike the hateful creatures who supported the attack) means that you feel the pain of this event whether you personally sustained a loss or not.  It has coloured our history (“stained the pages of our life’s book backwards,” to paraphrase L. M. Montgomery) and now it is one of those times we’ll always remember.  I don’t consider September 11 to have been an attack on America so much as it was an attack on the West, an attack on educated thinking, even an attack on Judeo-Christianity.  Goodness knows I don’t agree with everything the West stands for (I’m looking at you, Katy Perry) but no nominally moral person is going to feel anything but disgust for a group who thinks that the murder of innocent bystanders is laudable.  So for all the victims of 9/11, may you find comfort in knowing that we won’t forget.  And may God help us change the course of history from here on out, and become the generation of humans around the globe who actually moved closer to world peace instead of mutual destruction.