September 11, 2001

The day that changed my generation forever. Let's start with the obvious personal question...where was I and where was your father?

It was a Tuesday morning. Your father and I lived in an apartment in Velma. He was working in the oil fields. I don't recall for sure how he heard, perhaps over a radio station, a CB radio or cell phone, or someone coming onto location to tell them. I was at the apartment, having slept in because I didn't have any classes that day. That semester of college I was only taking a MWF schedule, with no classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays. I had been awake for a while and had just turned on the TV and saw the aftermath of the first plane. I watched in horror as the second plane hit the towers, knowing instantly that it deliberate. Two plane could not possible hit on accident. Knowing at that moment, hundreds and possible thousands of people had just died. I stayed glued to the television. Watching those towers fall to the ground and the dust clouds that filled the city is indescribable. I knew absolutely no one in New York City, but felt such despair for them, such heartache.

When things seemed as bad as they could be, they just got worse. Another plane hit the Pentagon and yet another crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. More lives lost. Mass confusion and the forced landing of all aircrafts immediately. There were absolutely no planes in the air for three days. The sky was silent, a eerie calm.

Then the local news mentioned gas prices going up. Well, I had class the next day, so I went out to put gas in the car. There were ridiculously long lines at both gas stations in Velma and the price of gas doubled. One store ran out of gas, so I gave up and came home. Later, many stores across the country got in trouble for price gouging. It's a mob mentality and fear-mongering. People automatically and instinctively go into survival mode, looking out for themselves. There was this air of uncertainty, of what will tomorrow bring, of will there be more attacks. Will we be at war?


As fate would have it, my World Lit class was schedule to read excerpts from the Koran that week. I was lucky enough to have a professor that not only understood the history of the Koran and Islam, but had personal experience in the Middle East. She had once lived in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Her then-husband, while he was British, he had a darker complexion, one that made many people mistake him for being Middle Eastern. Any time they traveled, he was always pulled aside for Customs questioning. Even though they booked their flight together and paid for the tickets together, shared the same last name, and ordered seats right next to each other, she was never pulled aside for questioning. All of this was well before the first attempt on the World Trade Center in 1992. So, that point to a glaring problem with security right there. If he had been what they suspected, he could have gotten away with anything simply by having her carry the necessary supplies on board with her.

But, getting back to the World Lit Class. We spent that Wednesday, the day after, talking in a kind of stunned state. That day definitely colored our conversations about the Koran and religion and politics. For days afterward, there was no air traffic because they had halted all air travel. That left many people stranded in airports, scrambling for rental cars, trains, buses, anyway to get back home. The airline industry suffered greatly after this and airport security was increased to extreme measures. I remember the first day they allowed planes to fly again was Convocation at Cameron. For my scholarship, I was required to attend and during the middle of the keynote speaker's address, a plane flew overhead. The speaker stopped, everyone basically held their breath as the plane passed overhead, and then the speaker went on to say something about how things are moving on or something to that effect. That moment, and many others afterward, were tense and full of fear of the unknown, fear of the what-ifs, and fear the terrorists wanted us to feel.

Then came the patriotism, the pride, the war effort in Afghanistan then onto Iraq and it became a political debacle. Weapons of mass destruction? Sadaam Hussein's regime being toppled, him being captured and executed, how to withdraw troops. Why did we go into Iraq in the first place and what did Iraq have to do with the September 11th attack or Bin Laden? So many questions without any answers.