Anniversary
September 11, 2004
Jess:
I had to work the 7a-3p reporter shift Saturday. September 11. We covered several memorial events to the tragedy and people at each one mentioned remembering exactly where they where when they heard the news three years ago.
If my memory of that day is right, it was a mild sunny day like this one. I awoke to an NPR report of a strange series of disasters that appeared to be related and might have been attack of some kind.
You were the first person I spoke to. You called as I rubbed the sleepiness from my eyes. You asked me what was going on. Even the clearest explanation was incomprehensible. I turned my TV on to see what they were saying.
I watched the towers fall.
How trivial our concerns were on such a momentous day. So much for meeting in Nashville for RTNDA, we correctly, and selfishly, surmised. The Earth has its axis and we have ours, spinning in our own worlds.
How else do we see things but through our own eyes?
I went to work. With no sports to cover (if it hadn't been cancelled it would have been too insignificant to mention under the circumstances), the news director wanted to send me home. I stayed and instead turned a news story about people panicking over gas prices. It later helped me land my job here in Cincinnati.
People's suffering helped my career. Isn't that the lot of a reporter? Making a living off of other people's misery? In that way we're like police officers and firefighters.
Sometimes we even run toward burning buildings when other people run away, though most people think we're attempting self-promotion rather than heroism when we do it. They're often right. But not always.
At least anniversaries of tragedy are easier to cover than the original we're remembering. A solder wounded in Iraq spoke at one of the events I covered. Army Staff Sgt. Paul Brondhaver leaned on his cane as I interviewed him. Both his ACLs are blown out and he hasn't had a chance to have the surgery yet, he said. Purple splotches still dot his hands -- reminders of the 300 pieces of shrapnel that buried themselves in him when a rocket-propelled-grenade hit his convoy in July.
"People see my hands," he said. "They should see my legs." They got the worst of it; his labored pigeon-toed limp tells you.
Typical of this guy, he looked to the bright side when I asked him what he wanted people who showed up to the event to take away from it. "I'd like people on September 11 to take away good thoughts and think of the positives and think of how strong America is together."
He might really believe that. Most of us mouth the words appropriate to occasions like this then ease back into our routines, heads down and focused only on the next bit of pavement before us, angered when inconvenienced by some new security measure that sticks a leg out to trip us in our march through the day.
Time might not heal all wounds but enough time makes us forget them. Most of those who lived through the original "day which will live in infamy!" are not alive to sound the alarms of its lesson. If they were, would we have had a repeat of a sneak attack from an enemy whose reach we believed we exceeded?
Those who fail to read history are doomed to repeat tenth grade.
You, my dear, are doomed to try to figure out what the point of all this was. All I can offer is that I get this way when I sleep too little.
You're probably not the only one who thinks it's time I take a nap.
Your wish is my snooze button. The world will not revolve around me when I'm spinning in my grave.
John
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©2004 John McQuiston