Reporters Notebook: Remembering 9-11
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It's hard to believe that Friday marked 25 years since terrorists tied to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda flew airplanes into the two World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, with a fourth plane sent into the ground in a field in Pennsylvania due to the bravery of its passengers and likely saving more lives.
A certain generation can remember where they were when they heard about the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into World War II. Another generation knows where they were when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated or when the Berlin Wall fell, signaling an end to the Cold War.
I always joke that I am a Xennial: a young member of Generation X and an old millennial. I am a proud member of the Class of 2000, back when the most dangerous thing we had to worry about was our computers not understanding the date when the new year began. I was a relatively new 19-year-old heading into the fall of 2001.
I have always felt odd talking about where I was when I first learned about the attacks of 9/11, because there is nothing particularly special about where I was. I was in a classroom in my first semester at Ohio Valley College overlooking Vienna (soon renamed Ohio Valley University and now non-existent). Word began to spread about the first plane crash in class. When the second plane hit, class was canceled.
Ohio Valley College was a Church of Christ-affiliated liberal arts school, which was an unusual place for me, a Oneness Pentecostal, to attend. I had taken a year off after graduating high school and was given several scholarships to get me in the door at OVC. In hindsight, I regret having gone there, but alas, that's where I was on 9/11.
Students gathered in the main lobby and chapel at OVC. The main building (now the West Virginia University at Parkersburg Innovation and Technology Center) was both where classes were held and where the men's dorms were. The building was also once home to a Catholic seminary. In fact, the chapel still had confessionals in the back, which were used for random storage and made for great locations for making out with your girlfriend (so I'm told).
But on this day, the chapel was used for its main purpose: prayer. Students circled around each other, holding hands, and praying. Beyond watching the TV news, there wasn't much else to do. I remember at one point, trying to seek some normalcy, I drove into town to get a haircut only to find most of Parkersburg and Vienna a ghost town. Everyone had gone home. We were under attack, and it wasn't entirely clear what the scope of the attack was.
It really can't be overstated how much 9/11 changed everything for my generation. I have a cousin who was in the Navy doing EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) off Afghanistan's small coastline along the Arabian Sea, dismantling mines in case of a military landing in the weeks after 9/11. Other friends enlisted in the military and served in Afghanistan and, a few years later, Iraq. I nearly went into the U.S. Marine Corps myself.
I didn't do much air travel prior to 9/11 due to growing up poor, but I did manage to take two trips with my parents to visit my mother's sister in Idaho. But we now have a generation that will never know what it is like to not take off your shoes and belt, to go through X-ray machines and be patted down by TSA officers.
The conversations being had across this state about Flock Safety cameras and similar hardware are made possible, in part, by the Patriot Act and the surveillance state created at the time to catch terrorists. The Department of Homeland Security was founded. Some can argue that we gave up some of our freedom for a little bit of security back then.
For me, 9/11 was a catalyst for me to continue writing and news reporting. I discovered writers, some of whom started the first web logs (blogs) - and whose prose, especially about 9/11 and politics in general, helped inform my own writing and blogging at the time. People like Tony Pierce, Matt Welch, Ken Layne and even Chris Stirewalt, whose work I used to read at the Charleston Daily Mail.
A few years ago I visited the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero, with the new Freedom Tower casting a shadow over the former footprints of the two towers. I've seen the 9/11 exhibit at the former Newseum in Washington, D.C., which had the TV antenna that sat atop the north tower, as well as the front pages of newspapers from all across the nation and world from that fateful day.
It's one thing to have watched the tragedy on TV. It's an entirely different thing to see artifacts and rubble from the collapse. There is no way to know the scope, and for those who had to flee for their lives or those who spent weeks hoping their loved one was still alive in the rubble, I cannot imagine.
It is also crazy for me to think there are young adults alive today who were not alive when 9/11 occurred. I often wonder whether those young adults think about it in the same way as young adults thought about the events of 1941, 1963, or 1989 did 25 years after the fact. In this day and age of the internet, social media and scrolling from one post to the next, do we think about any historical events the same way?
Where I was when 9/11 occurred was not significant, but 9/11 changed all of our lives in many complex ways. And that is why we must always remember.
Steven Allen Adams can be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com.