Have we forgotten?

Very regrettably, as a nation, the farther away we get from 9/11/2001, the closer we get to 9/10/2001...

A friend of mine posted the above statement on Facebook yesterday, the day before the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. When the attacks occurred, he and I were both in our sophomore year at Rutgers University. Facebook and Twitter hadn't even been created yet. I was a student journalist and he was an EMT. In the days that followed he would end up in New York aiding in the recovery effort and I would end up reporting on the aftermath from Rutgers.

Like most people that live through a national tragedy (my parents still recall where they were when they learned President Kennedy had been assassinated) I vividly recall where I was when I learned that our country was under attack. I was in my car, driving to the bank before my first class of the day. For some reason the radio was tuned to Opie and Anthony and they were talking about a plane hitting a building in NYC. It seemed like a joke, like some idiot had made a fatal miscalculation and somehow crashed into a huge skyscraper. I didn't realize the size of the plane or the magnitude of the issue until I got to the bank and walked into the building where they always had a big television screen tuned to the news. As I walked into the bank I watched as a second plan hit the South Tower. I remember the shock of the reporters and the other people in the bank as we all tried to understand what was happening.

While I went to my first class that day, my art history teacher who lived in NYC was so distraught she was unable to teach. Rutgers quickly cancelled classes and dispatched counselors around campus. Everything seemed to come to a grinding halt. Even if I had wanted to drive home to Bergen County I wouldn't have been able to because the NJ Turnpike had been closed to all but emergency vehicles. I did make the drive home days later and looked in disbelief at the smoke billowing from the skyline in the distance. Newark Airport had been turned into a parking lot with hundreds of planes all over the tarmac because aircraft were still grounded.

I left my class and went straight to the office of The Daily Targum. I was an editor and we quickly set out to develop a plan for covering the attacks, how the Rutgers community was responding and also had to figure out how we would deliver our pages to the printer and get the paper distributed the next day.

When I finally got in touch with my mother (it took a few hours because phone systems were overwhelmed) she told me that my dad, a career and volunteer firefighter, had gotten on a firetruck bound for New York after FDNY put out a call for help. My dad became a firefighter because his cousin was FDNY. Many of his friends were active FDNY and he offered to help without a second thought. He called my mom to tell her he was going and then we waited. He didn't have a cell phone (I was the only family member who did at the time) and for hours we would have no idea where he was. It turns out it took his truck hours to get across the GWB in gridlock and when it finally did, it was dispatched to the Bronx to respond to fires there. But I still remember how scary it was not knowing where he was. If I wasn't able to put on my reporter hat that day and focus more on what others were doing and feeling instead of my own feelings I don't think I would have gotten through the day.

I went to vigils around campus, talked to tearful students who were worried not only about family or friends in New York, but also about the possibility of more attacks. I called my own friends at school in NYC to check on them -- it took hours -- and I ended up interviewing my cousin's husband who was in the towers and made it out alive (her birthday is 9/11 and she says his safe return home was the best gift she's every gotten). Her husband watched his building go down just after he got out. He told me all he could think about was the firefighters who were running up the stairs as they were all running down them. His words still make me tear up whenever I think about them.

Amid all the sadness that I experienced personally and in my reporting, the thing that has stuck with me all these years is the incredible sense of unity that followed. People stood in line to donate blood for the victims, strangers helped each other find their way home amid a mass transit shutdown, students consoled people they had never met before. There was divisiveness that followed as well, including anti-war protests and hatred against Muslims or anyone that looked like they could be Muslim. But I will never forget the incredible sense of camaraderie that this nation experienced. Despite what we had gone through, we seemed so much stronger on September 12 than we did on September 10. We understood that working together was better than working against one another. I can't help but feel that the people who are leading our country have forgotten that. They're more focused on partisanship than on accomplishing things together. I can only hope that today will serve as a reminder of how important unity is.

This blog post is an assignment for the Theory and Practice of Social Media course at NJIT.