I'm kind of upset my school didn't do anything....my social studies teacher said it had been her fourth day at the school....my old school didn't do anything either, despite the fact they had a moment of silence last year. And I kind of kind in an argument with one of those 9/11 conspiracy theorists types on the subway this morning.....mostly because I had seen the latest thing on Maddox's site a few weeks ago >_<;; I was pretty embaressed.
In any case....
It was my third or second day of fourth grade; I was nine years old. We kept noticing all this traffic outside (I live in NYC), and our teacher kept insisting that it was just some traffic or whatever. But I clearly remember seeing her on the phone with a sort of shocked look; when someone asked what was wrong, she just said everything was fine....I kept seeing kids being taken out early and didn't know why. My mom later told me that she was going to take me out as well, but they were stopping the parents from doing that after a while.
Then, later, our (new) principal came in to tell us that two airplanes had crashed into World Trade Center. Only me and one other girl gasped. I don't think any of the kids in the room were able to comprehend exactly what had happened. Personally, I hadn't even settled on the fact that George W. Bush was the president of the United States. God.
I think school was closed for the rest of the week. It was really pretty terrible being in the city. I live a good three miles away from where the WTC used to be, and I was getting the effect of all the debris and stuff in the air from there for around five days.
It really just amazes me how much I didn't understand. I couldn't really even shed a tear. I just could visualize such a tragedy having truely occured. I kept saying to myself that Mirai no Trunks would have been able to come in his time machine and save the day. In a few days, no one but myself would even remember that the tragey of September eleventh had even happened. However, even at that age, I knew I was just trying to make things better for myself.
I used to think of my life as a boring time period, that I wished I lived in a more exciting one where war was taking place, and you could eat candy because you needed the sugar for the soldiers. But I think I finally realized that bad things can happen; the bad guys
can prevail. We had followed the elections closely that year, and I was terribly upset by the result. I was just frustrated that someone had gotten away with cheating. Not to mention.....the Mets having lost the subway series that year.....and my dad would have bought me an N64....
So yeah, it really stays as so much more vivid when you were in the actual city that it happened... But I was happy that we pretty much got back to somewhat normal. When I look back at that time, I tend to simply remember all that happened to me as normal fourth grader, with a really superb teacher, instead of a New Yorker.
When I think about it....it really took a good two years before everyone truly got back to noarmal, and I was waiting a lot of the time. You know, three days or so after the attacks I noticed I had missed an episode of DBZ. It was actually an episode that they did happen to play the second time around, but they purposely skipped it because a large building was on fire. It's really tough to be remembering those times when living with excessive fear of terrorism in New York, because it was just so apparent, and you want to block it from your memory. I suppose fourth
was the grade I started to become very depressed......man.....I will never forget....
Mr. Sparkle wrote:
When 9-11 happened it didn't faze me. But recently I watched
this, and it did make me cry.
God, I'm so happy someone posted that. I saw that the other day, and it almost made me cry too. Jon Stweart is simply amazing.
I didn't watch that show when I was that young, but I do remember wondering what he would do on the show after 9/11....