20 Years Later

I’ve been thinking about September 11, 2001 for the last few days leading up to this 20th Anniversary day. And this day evokes so many thoughts and emotions for me. 

Of all the things people can say about this day, I never tire of hearing the “where I was when the 2nd plane hit” stories… because they are intrinsic proof of an instant rift in time, a massive chasm that separated the “then” and the “now”.

Where, outside of NYC, the skies over Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon, nothing was physically different, but everything was different, nonetheless.  

A paradigm shift. 

As an Oklahoman, I was no stranger to the word “terrorism”, as Timothy McVeigh had taught us all what that meant in 1995 when he leveled the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building, killing 168 Oklahomans, in an act labeled “domestic terror.” 

But McVeigh was an American. And not just an American, but an ex-military, freedom-loving, American.

As evil and misguided as his actions were, McVeigh didn’t hate “Americans”. 

Tim McVeigh hated the Government and what he saw as its intrusive overreach and abusive control over everyday Americans trying to live freely. His motive was fundamentally different; and while horrifying, all the facts of the McVeigh case confirmed the OKC bombing was an isolated tragedy. The label “domestic terrorist” created no ongoing fear in me. McVeigh was caught. He was one man, with one plan, and it was over.

On that morning of September 11, 2001, I walked into my 10th Grade Oklahoma History Class, one of the few classrooms with a television in it, and saw a silent class full of students listening fervently to news moderators very cautiously debate what had just happened with an airplane that flew into the North Tower of the WTC Complex just shortly before I had arrived.

“Was this an accident?”

“Was this terrorism? Planes have hit WTC towers before, but none of this magnitude.”

“That was a direct hit. Definitely not an accident.”

“What is the motive?”

So many questions being tossed around by professionals just as perplexed as the rest of the watching world.

All eyes glued to the live video feed of smoke rising from the North Tower, our classroom of students quietly observing, trying to make sense of what we were seeing, hanging on every word of, then, trusted and beloved news anchorman and women. 

I remember seeing tears in my teacher’s eyes, knowing she somehow understood much more about this than I could at 16 years old. 

And then it happened, in real time, at 8:03 AM (CST) a collective gasp of horror and dismay came simultaneously from the mouths of everyone in the room as United Flight 175 seemed to come out of nowhere and smashed into the South Tower. 

We all looked around the room frantically, seeking confirmation on the faces of our friends that our eyes did just see what we thought they saw. 

A second stream of smoke began rising into the sky. 

Shortly after, the word “terrorism” was used definitively. 

The 2nd plane was all the proof we needed to confirm this was no accident, nor was the first plane isolated. If these people (whomever they were) pulled off hijacking two jets and crashing them into NYC skyscrapers, what else could they have planned that hasn’t yet happened?

And possibly for the first time in my 16 years of life, I realized people across the world who didn’t even know me, somehow hated me, purely because of where I was born and because of the freedoms under which I was blessed to reside. 

They hated me, they hated us, simply because we were American. And didn’t just hate us with words of disgust – they hated us enough to fly planes into buildings and murder thousands of innocent people. They valued this mission of murder more than their own lives.

We were locked down in that room for the rest of the morning. We sat in even more horror as we watched people jump from the floors above the burning infernos, knowing they couldn’t be rescued. 

We listened to the news commentators try to make sense of this sound they kept hearing in the background of their news correspondents’ feeds on the ground, only to come to the hollowing realization it was the sound of people hitting the concrete and the vehicles around the towers, as they chose to fall to their own deaths over suffering the anguish of being cooked alive by 3000 degree flames of jet fuel. 

We watched in complete dismay as the South Tower suddenly collapsed on itself without warning, floor by floor, all the way down, knowing there were hundreds, if not thousands of Americans that had showed up to work that day, and just literally died on live National television. 

We wept as the reports came in of the hundreds of first responders who were in the South Tower headed up to assist in evacuations when it fell. 

And an hour later, we watched the same thing happen to the North Tower. 

The live images of people fleeing the suffocating clouds of pulverized concrete, covered in ash and blood, screaming in absolute shock and horror will never leave me. 

Shortly after the North Tower fell, we saw the plane wreckage of United Flight 93 smeared across that field in Pennsylvania. Headed toward the Capitol or White House, we were told, until the Passengers revolted after finding out from friends and family on the ground what had just unfolded in NYC. 

The Oklahoma sky was bright that day when they released us to go home shortly after lunch. But the world felt fundamentally different than it did when I stepped into that classroom at 7:45 AM that morning to the picture of Tower 1 burning. 

• Tower 1

• Tower 2

• The Pentagon

• The Capitol/White House (subverted to a Pennsylvania Field)

This was a full-scale attack on everything that symbolized what America stood for – our economy, our military, our governmental leadership and presence on the world stage. 

Hatred with this level of action was instantly terrifying. What did they have planned next? Were any of us safe? 

I woke up feeling safe. I went to bed wondering if my family, my friends, or their families would be the next victims of such unfathomable hatred. This was not Tim McVeigh. Tim McVeigh was one man sitting on death row in a Federal prison.

This was war. This was thousands, it not millions, or people across the globe with the same agenda: destroy America. And for the first time, I felt the definition of the word terrorism.

And every single time over the last 20 years that I’ve walked into a crowded arena, a major sporting event, or any public place where thousands of people are gathered, I have thought about the morning of 9/11/01 and the 2,977 Americans who were just going about their normal lives and were violently obliterated without warning. 

In that way, 9/11 changed me.

I’m unsure if I will ever hear a plane flying low overhead and not wonder if it’s “supposed to be there” or if I will ever be enjoying the excitement of a crowded venue and not wonder if someone has something nefarious planned for us all.

Then, I also think about the heroes of United Flight 93 who literally stood up to fear and death and flew their own hijacked plane into the ground instead of seeing it explode our very epicenter of freedom into flames. 

And this is the memory of 9/11 that I keep the closest to my heart, and the one that I feel has continued to influence me the most as an adult. Rather than letting fear win, this story of the passengers of Flight 93 is the literal embodiment of that famous line in “Air Force One” when Harrison Ford gruffly exclaims, “Get off my plane!” because America doesn’t cower to fear-mongering terrorist.

As many of you know the story, on that September morning aboard Flight 93, Todd Beamer and some other brave men and women concocted a plan to take back the cockpit and keep the plane from reaching its final destination, even knowing they would not survive. The last thing Beamer was overheard saying to his band of brothers by the Airfone Supervisor Lisa Jefferson that he had been communicating with on the ground was, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll…”

20 years later, and the transcript of Lisa Jefferson’s phone call with Todd Beamer still grips me.

It’s why I always know where my exits are, why I always have one eye open for people who look like they’re up to no good, why I’ve already got a plan in my mind if something goes down, because, like another American hero who stopped a terrorist shooting on a train in France said, “I refuse to die sitting down.”

This portion of the 9/11 story is arguably why I feel even more passionate about standing up to tyranny today, as an adult, than I knew to 20 year ago, no matter where it arises, because like the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke so perfectly stated:

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

And after all we’ve been through in the last 20 years, I’m disappointed that we no longer have media anchors we can trust; that it’s hard to find the commonality of American brotherhood that existed in the days following September 11, 2001, where men and women of every color were flooding military recruitment offices to defend this Nation; that now you’re a vandalism target if you fly an American flag; that political leaders and powerful executives have sold their integrity and our personal freedoms, the very thing that makes America worth defending, for wealth and power.

I’m embarrassed that saying things like “I’m proud to be an American” or “I support the US military” now makes you some sort of political extremist.

I’m heartbroken that my children will continue to grow up in a country more divided than I can remember it in my lifetime, and one that is arguably more vulnerable to future terrorist attacks due to a war we were unable to end, weak leadership plagued with personal quid pro quos, and the inability to work together politically to solve basic problems for fear of being labeled as “consorting with the enemy”.

I grieve the time in history when we were capable of putting aside differences, coming together, rallying against a common enemy, and pledging mutual assurance to the success of the defense of Freedom.

20 years later, and we’ve been deceived into believing we are each other’s common enemy instead.

Because “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” – Mark 3:25

However, no matter how grave the current outlook is in America, today I choose to remember the 2,977 Americans who died on the September 11, 2001, the hundreds more first responders who died from cancer after being exposed to hazardous chemicals at ground zero, and the tens of thousands of brave men and women who took up arms to avenge our brothers and sisters overseas in the War on Terror for the last two decades.

Today, I’m praying for the survivors, the families of those who didn’t survive, and families of our military personnel who gave their lives overseas to defend this Nation.

Today, I’m going to look at pictures of rubble and wreckage and read stories of victims and survivors and remember how wounded and exposed, but UNITED, we felt on September 11, 2001, and no matter how dark the days seem ahead of us, I’m going to go to sleep tonight believing there will always be men and women of integrity and resolve in this country, ready to stand up, look evil in the face, and say, “Let’s roll.”

Shannon

https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20210910/lets-roll-todd-beamers-father-on-the-valiant-fight-for-flight-93

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/09/911-the-day-of-the-attacks/100143/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/photos/photos-remembering-911-148555/image-57735292

Full list of the 2,977 victims who died on September 11