And then the plane slammed into the tower...

            I remember that morning 13 years ago as if it happened yesterday. My sister and I were chatting on the phone early in the morning when she paused and said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I envisioned a small Cessna tourist plane, one where the pilot had accidentally gotten off course.

            When I arrived at the newspaper, then Managing Editor Bob Haenel had the television on and a video of the burning tower was on the screen. We were all standing in his office, wondering how a pilot could miss seeing the country’s tallest skyscraper.

            And then the second plane hit and we were stunned. Bob turned, looked and us and said “Call the police, the fire department and the hospitals. People, we’re at war.”

            In disbelief, silence and shock, we ran to our desks and started calling local law enforcement agencies. All I could think about, though, was my family. My husband worked in downtown Houston and I was sick at my stomach, wondering if Houston was on the list to be hit.

            My sons were in school, and I prayed their teachers were shielding them from the horror.          As I talked to officials, it was obvious everybody was doing their job, even though our voices held a trace of a tremor. By 11 a.m., all the planes were out of the sky, but we still weren’t sure if more attacks were going to happen.

            When the paper hit the press, I rushed out the door to pick my sons up from school. The drive there was eerie. No one honked their horns, people merged in politeness and there was a silence and respect on the roadways I’ve never experienced since that day.

 

Our Watershed Moments

            Over the last dozen years, we’ve grown numb to shocks. Innocent villages are ransacked in the Middle East, and we barely look up at the television. Terrorist groups are growing, but we turn up our iPods and bury our heads in the sand.

            Our military bases are attacked our own personnel, but we seem to take it all in stride. It’s as if we simply can’t take any more bad news because that news hurts too much.

            But bad news isn’t new. My mother’s generation remembers where they were when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and how the country rallied together. She often talks about the paper drives and air raid drills and going to sleep scared at night.

            My generation’s water-shed moment was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was in the second grade and remember distinctly the principal opening our door and telling us to pray for the president who’d just been killed.

I don’t think of that November day very often, but I do whenever I see any president exposed and out in the open.

            This generation’s moment that changed their lives is, sadly, 9/11. Some will remember it as a day when cowards slaughtered innocent people. Others have an image of firemen raising the American flag in the rubble of the downed towers.

            Perhaps, like those of us who’ve grown older in the years that follow tragedies, they will see bravery and solidarity and remember this can still be the greatest country on the planet.

From the Marines on Iwo Jima to a slain president’s draped casket to three New York City firefighters looking up at a dusty flag, the Stars and Stripes remains straight and true.

            And that’s the image I choose to keep.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.