Editor’s Note: First draft – reporters had a job to do
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As people across the country were recounting their memories of Sept. 11, 2001, last week, in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of that tragedy, I realized something. I and others in newsrooms everywhere experienced it differently.
When you work in news, especially if it is part of your job to keep an eye on the news wire services all day, in addition to your local stories, you have to turn off the reactions normal people have to horrifying events. (Don't get me wrong. We react, and we process later; but there's a job to get done.)
So when someone mentions Sept. 11, my first memory is of my dad calling to wake me up in the middle of the night (that would be a little after 9 a.m. -- this was early enough in my career that I was still finishing work in the wee small hours.)
He told me to get up, get in to the office.
I complained, but he had better instincts about this sort of things than I did. He knew this was bigger than what we'd already seen.
I huffed, but got ready and went in ... and didn't stop working for a loooong time.
The second thing that comes to mind is my mother, who was a school administrator at the time, who also didn't quite understand the magnitude of what was happening until she saw the military recruiting guys who'd been in the ROTC office running down the hallway and out of the building.
These are stories I've told many times.
Truly, even with the TV on in the newsroom and Associated Press breaking news alerts pouring in faster than I'd ever seen, it was not until the next day that my mind caught up with how much about the world had just changed.
Years later, I would go to work for a news company with offices in Jersey City, N.J. -- just across from lower Manhattan ... where their offices had been until the attacks. It didn't click for me that many of my coworkers didn't experience that day just as journalists, but as survivors until we later moved again to offices in midtown.
Some of them had an emotional reaction to going back to work across the Hudson River, that I am grateful I will never understand.
So, being professionally nosy, I asked one of them about it.
She confirmed what I suspected. Even in the middle of it all, it was impossible to flip off the newshound switch. Even then, they were cushioned from it in a way others in lower Manhattan were not.
In fact -- back to that bit about how we tend to process events much later -- she said it wasn't until she glanced across the river one day from the Jersey City location and was struck out of the blue by not just the difference in the skyline, but the idea that "We used to work RIGHT there," she felt it fully. Just for a moment, though. And then, back to work.
What they and those of us working in newsrooms everywhere did that day -- and in the weeks and months afterward -- has become the basis for what is taught to the generations of students who have no first-hand knowledge at all.
They know the fear followed by resolve only because they hear it in stories.
They react to what they're reading or watching; not anything (thank goodness) they have experienced. They are observing what we have become, a quarter-century after that day they have learned about.
It's hard not to wonder what they see, and whether they will be able to steer things any differently because they do not have emotions attached.
No, they don't feel about it the way we do -- just like most of us don't (can't) feel about Vietnam, Korea or the World Wars like our parents and grandparents did.
But that's OK. We can keep talking to them about all the ways in which we experienced that day -- and how it shaped what we became afterward.
It will be up to them to be clear-eyed about continuing to lead us forward.