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President George Bush was seated in a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Florida when it happened. His chief of staff, Andrew Card, suddenly approached, bent down, and said, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."
I looked up that statement after seeing a television report last weekend about that horrendous life-changing day. I checked it because Card, now 79, recently stated something else that made me think: "People who are 25 today don't know about what it is that we promised never to forget." Never to forget.
I returned to Google research and was stunned at the answer to my query. The number of Americans under 25 today is 105 million. That means 32% of us, almost a third, were not alive when the attacks occurred at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on the 40 hapless souls that perished in Shanksville on flight 93.
How to explain it to our young people? How to make them understand the horror that stupefied us, broke our hearts, and felt a sorrow among ourselves we'd never known. It unfolded in our living rooms, and we wore the attacks, the lives lost, like a shroud.
We all have private memorable occasions in our lives - the happiness of weddings, births, graduations, and personal victories. And we all suffer loss in some ways - the distressing illnesses, financial woes, deaths. We carry those significant days in our hearts, but they are personal. We, the two-thirds of us who were alive on 9/11, suffer that day's memories nationally. Together. Never to forget.
Looking back on my long life there were significant national occurrences in many decades. The Bay of Pigs crisis was the day before my 21st birthday. I thought, here I am entering my majority and we're going to war with our worst enemy? It was the first time I thought that what happened nationally could actually affect me. I felt my optimistic youth start to slip into the reality of adulthood.
A year later President Kennedy was assassinated, an event that horrorstruck our generation. This can't happen to us... not here. Assassinations happen in second and third-world countries, not in our America the beautiful. Then came Martin Luther King. Robert Kennedy. Kent State. Watergate. The never-ending Viet Nam war. And war. More war. School shootings. Then Covid.
All were events that hardened us, strained our credulity, stole our innocence. We experienced them together. And somehow, as it plays back every year, 9/11 is the pivotal event that changed us all. Our largest, strongest city was brought to its knees as we witnessed bodies hurling from its tallest windows, its twin towers collapse, its running, terrified office workers covered in grey silt. The pictures are engraved in us, but we somehow can't explain our forever feelings to the under-25 crowd. The burning images are ours.
I am also transported this week back to the tenth anniversary ceremonies. I had promised myself I wouldn't watch that day because I knew I would turn into a slobbering mess. But I wanted to see the newly-finished memorial at Ground Zero. And of course, I got caught up - for hours - in the dedications, the music, and then, the names.
I got immersed as the names were read when I realized how many Adamses there were - five I think - and I wondered how many were in the same family. I began to listen for multiple surnames and quickly lost it when they read the name of Joseph Angelini, Jr. followed by Joseph Angelini, Sr., their successive photos depicting two firefighters. The incomprehensible devastation of one family overwhelmed me. As my eyes filled, the names continued ....
The early part of the alphabet contributed our Anglo-Saxon roots ... after Adams came lots of Allens followed by multiple Baileys, Bennetts, and Davidsons. Then our national melting pot gradually emerged with the loss of many called Diaz, Gomez, and Gonzalez, mixed with Brennans, Duffys, and Gallaghers, the Cohens, Glicks, and Goldsteins, and so many Changs and Chungs.
America's Poet Laureate Billy Collins' poem was read at that ceremony. Titled "The Names," it has a message that cuts deep. The last line, "So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart."
I sat thinking about us as a people - we heretofore fortunate Americans, complacently buffered by our oceans, unused to terrorist violence. Now, 15 years later, I see us more used to violence than I ever thought possible. And so it is that this week, the 25th anniversary brings us back to that day. Again.
Never to forget.
Marcy O'Brien can be reached at Moby.32@hotmail.com.