It is hard to believe Saturday will mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on America. It was a grim day for our country, but in the wake of the terror attacks on our native soil, a light dawned on a nation united in patriotism and mourning for our country and the nearly 3,000 Americans killed that day.
It was like any other deadline day. Tuesdays meant long hours as we got the paper ready for press. I was a 26-year-old editor back then, working for my hometown newspaper, The Southaven Press.
When my telephone rang that morning, I was drinking coffee in a drowsy haze with a re-run of “The Golden Girls” filling the silence of my living room.
My associate editor, Cynthia Bullion, was calling to tell me a plane had struck one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Flipping the channel, a stunned silence fell over us as another plane crashed into the second tower. Even before the anchors on NBC news confirmed it, we already knew the crashes were not accidental.
Soon after, visions of smoke billowing up from the Pentagon filled the television screen, with flames striking out of a ragged hole on the side of the building caused by a third plane crashing into the building.
As footage from New York and Washington, D.C. aired live, I watched people hanging out of windows of the twin towers. Some people chose to jump rather than face the horror inside that building. Those images live on in my memory today.
The first tower collapsed. People were running – people white with ash running for their lives as nearly 1,800 feet of concrete and steel gave way and collapsed onto the streets below. Then the second tower fell.
With the air thick from debris, it was impossible to air footage from the ground. My television screen was filled with a shot from afar of the island of Manhattan engulfed in a cloud of ash.
Then reports of another plane crashing in a Pennsylvania field began to unfold. Heroic passengers had intervened when terrorists aimed the plane toward our nation’s capital.
September 11 was only the second time the United States was attacked by a foreign enemy. On December 6, 1941, more than 2,400 American military personnel were killed when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Nearly 60 years later, more than 2,900 people were killed in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Penn.
Unlike the attack on Pearl Harbor, what happened on September 11 was witnessed by the entire world, as it unfolded live on news outlets worldwide. The images of terror filled our living rooms and our lives for months following and as the War on Terror commenced.
While there were so many differences between the two attacks, there were many similarities. Both led to the president speaking to a shocked nation, whose iconic words captured the emotions of the day.
After Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the nation, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941— a date which will live in infamy— the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."
On September 12, President George W. Bush spoke to a group of first responders from a pile a rubble at Ground Zero in New York. After shouts from the crowd alerting the president of not being able to hear his comments, he was handed a bullhorn.
“I can hear you!” he said. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people – and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
Both attacks led to a frenzy of patriotism and a nation united in its grief and calls for justice for those responsible for taking innocent American lives.
After Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II, where it joined its allies to fight the axis of evil -- Germany, Italy, and Japan. The attack created what journalist Tom Brokaw coined “The Greatest Generation.” It was the generation that pulled our country out of the depths of depression, kept the country going on the home front as American servicemen and women endured four years of war, and after built the most powerful country and economy in the world.
Twenty years ago, September 11 brought terrorism to the forefront of American life. Our country went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another kind of war commenced in our nation’s capital – a political one. Since that day 20 years ago, the United States went from united in tragedy to tragically divided, and that great divide has engulfed our country like that cloud of ash hovering over the island of Manhattan that fateful Tuesday morning.
The memories of September 11 are still so vivid in my mind, and I pray we never experience that type of tragedy again.
However, if only we could recreate the kindness, compassion, generosity, and patriotism Americans showed on September 12, we could lay the foundation of an even greater generation.
