9/11 defines 2000s for even the young

Written for Feature Article Writing course, Spring 2010. Never Published. 

9/11 defines 2000s for even the young
By Natalie Kirkpatrick

     For Caitlin Miller the image of the destroyed lobby of the World Trade Centers was a shocking image. For Gillian Avery the smell of burning buildings loomed in the air. Andrew MacCracken remembers huddling around a radio in class and Ellie Rutledge could only watch a few minutes of the news coverage before attempting a normal day at school. It seems that many people can remember Sept. 11, 2001 which makes it understandable why the Pew Research Center found it to be the biggest event of the decade.
     All four of them recall exactly where they were when they found out that a plane had flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
     “At the moment that the plane crashed into the towers I was at my locker. We were changing classes,” said Miller, a senior in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC from Noblesville, Indiana. Miller was in eighth grade at the time.
     Avery, a senior in the School of International Service at American University was in public school in Queens when her math teacher was replaced by her English teacher who also left the room multiple times.
     “It’s a New York City Public School, you don’t leave children unmanned!” Avery joked. After her teacher broke the news Avery said even the students close to the incident didn’t understand the implications.
     “We didn’t get it,” Avery said. “And he left again and we were all sitting around kind of talking about it. We didn’t get that it was really serious.”
     MacCracken, a junior in the School of Public Affairs at American University, was at his bus stop in Aspen, Colo.
     “One of my friends said, ‘The twin towers got knocked over’ and I had this really weird image in my head of this domino like thing,” MacCracken said.
     Rutledge, a sophomore at American University was in sixth grade in Indiana and had never been to New York before.
     “I found out in homeroom and I remember one of my best guy friends was telling everyone the World Trade Center has come down,” Rutledge said. “I was like, ‘What’s the World Trade Center?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know but it fell down.’”
     For all four students watching the news coverage helped unfold the seemingly confusing events.
     “I like turned on the radio and then we started to get it,” Avery said. “Not only had they hit the World Trade Center but by that time it had collapsed and they had hit the Pentagon,” Avery said.
     The radio was the means for gathering news for MacCracken as well.
     “Our TVs and everything at school weren’t hooked up to cable at the time because they had just been set up so I remember being huddled around a radio in one of my classes,” MacCracken said.
     For others it wasn’t the words that stuck but the images.
     “I think one of the most powerful ones was that shot from the street where the first tower was already in flames and then the camera caught the second plane coming in very low,” MacCracken said. “I’m getting chills thinking about it again right now.”
     Miller described her trip to New York City the summer before 9/11. She remembered pausing with her parents to pose for a photo in the lobby of the World Trade Center, standing by the grand staircase, waiting for the elevator to bring them to the observation deck. Miller remembered a photo she had seen on the news of the lobby after the attack showing the grand stairs still in place.
     “That’s where our picture was. It was all pretty and everything and after the attacks the stairs but there’s all this debris around it,” Miller said. “We were standing there one year ago and now it’s a big crumbled mess.”
     For Avery the images weren’t immediate.
     “I never saw the footage of the planes hitting the building until six months after because my mom wouldn’t turn the television on,” Avery said. “She was like ‘No, you don’t have to watch it […] you can visualize it yourself, you don’t need to see it.’”
     The study titled “Current Decade Rates as Worst in 50 Years” put out by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press put out in December of 2009 noted the decade as a negative one.
     “As the current decade draws to a close, relatively few Americans have positive things to say about it,” the study said. “By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years,”
     Participants were offered a list of six major events of the decade and 53% said that the “Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were the single most important event of the decade.” Other events were Barack Obama’s election as president, the 2008 financial crisis, George W. Bush’s election as president, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.
     “That was the beginning of the decade so it kind of defined what the decade was about and it was so devastating that it kind of set this trend for the rest of the decade,” Rutledge said. “I definitely think that this decade has been depressing.”
     Miller said that among other terrorist attacks on American soil nothing compared with 9/11.
     “You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing it,” Miller said. “It’s something that has been burned into the minds of every person in America and touched people all across the county.”
     To Miller the trauma aided making it a key event of the decade.
     “I would definitely say it was something that defined this decade more than anything else, even more than having the first African American President,” Miller said. “It was the kind of event that was so traumatizing that you remember everything.”
     The study contradicted Miller’s thoughts and noted that younger Americans aren’t as likely to name Sept. 11, 2001 as the most important event of the decade.
     Miller, Avery, MacCracken and Rutledge were not even out of middle school on Sept. 11, 2001.
     “If it happened again today I know that I would be bawling if something like that happened because I understand more what it means and I understand more that thousands of people were killed whereas at the time I had absolutely no idea and I couldn’t really grasp that concept,” said Rutledge. “I wasn’t really old enough to grasp that.”
     MacCracken even described himself as a kid.
     “They had police on campus,” MacCracken said describing his school on the day of the attacks. “It made me nervous as a kid. I was smart enough to realize that Aspen, Colorado isn’t going to be a target but it is still bizarre to see that kind of police on an active school grounds.”
     Avery found herself separated from the attacks because of her age.
     “I had a part in it but I was also 13 at the time so it’s not like I lost my job because of it or I had to worry about financial security because of it or any other event really because I was still just growing up,” Avery said.

     All school schedules ran normally except for Avery’s. With the day off after the attacks, students returned to her school in Queens on Thursday, two days after the attacks.
     “It was weird because by that point you could smell from the buildings, you could smell the burning in the air,” Avery said. “I live pretty far, 15 miles away but you could smell it.”
     To Avery that was when the gravity of the situation sank in.
     “Then it was really obvious like the reason he got called to the office is because his mom works there and the reason why my friend’s mom called to say she was okay is because she was late to work that day,” Avery said. “My math teacher got called because her husband works there and all these other people I knew. Then it started to get depressing.”
     Despite their youth, all four students remember Sept. 11, 2001. Whether it’s an image of a grand staircase surrounded by debris, huddling with classmates to hear the news, watching the coverage on television or breathing in the smell of burning buildings on the way to school their childhood experience defined the decade.

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