Remembering 9-11

For most of my life, the tragic moment that haunted our nation was the assassination of President Kennedy. It was a truism that everyone could remember exactly where they were when they heard the news on November 22nd, 1963. I vividly recall the little four-room school I attended in rural Poplar, Wisconsin. I had just finished lunch when at the top of the stairs one of the older kids told us the president had been killed. I recall sitting for hours in front of the black & white television watching the news unfold, including graphic memories of seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald.

Now some 40 years later this generation has its own shared tragedy, and the rest of us have a second one to calibrate our lives to. I am sure all Americans remember the precise details of where and how they learned of the Sept. 11th attacks. I was on a flight bound for Oakland when they occured. The pilots and flight attendants hadn't said a thing, and perhaps they didn't know. But arriving in the airport, I immediately noticed that things weren't normal. Large groups were gathered around the televisions. And looking at the monitors, I saw all the departing and arriving flights were cancelled.

So I asked the first person I saw what was going on. A black woman in her 50's, she looked at me and said: "Terrorists have attacked the World Trade Centers and bombed the Pentagon." She declared this matter-of-factly, without emotion, but nevertheless with a familiarity that struck me as deeply as her words. Thousands of travelers were milling around bewildered and lost, most of us far from home and strangely disoriented. Like me, many were planning to conduct business, but suddenly all bets were off. I did attend one meeting that afternoon, which was almost surreal, but then even the wheels of commerce shut down, as if by mutual affirmation.

We are now left to contemplate how our world has changed. When I was a young child we used to have air raid drills in school. When the siren went off we would kneel down under our desks and put our heads to the ground until it stopped. In retrospect it seems silly, as if somehow our desks could protect us. But the drills managed to leave a profoundly oppressive cloud of nuclear-era uneasiness looming over my generation, reminding us all the time that the world was not a safe place; that we had enemies with the means and the desire to catch us unawares.

After a while we all forgot about the danger of attacks. Even while the Cold War was in full swing we began to believe that there wasn't much likelihood of nuclear war. We found collective comfort in the intellectuallly conceived principle that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was a sufficiently unpalatable deterrent. And for a while we all breathed easy. Now I realize that most of us have been guilty of taking the past few decades for granted, as we went about our ways with little thought to bad guys that might be plotting our destruction. But since the events of 9-11 the fear has returned, and every time we read the newspaper or go to the airport we are reminded that we once again live in a not-so-brave new world. This isn't likely to go away soon, and so we we must get used to the notion that while the end may not be in sight, it could be lurking in any of the dark alleys of our future.

I wish I could do better for my grandchildren, as I would like to see them laugh without care and sleep without concern. The world can be a pretty wonderful place to live. (As Robert Frost said, "I can think of no better.") I'd rather not have to worry about its darker side.