By John Pezzullo
To say that I will never forget 9/11 wouldn’t come close to explaining the impact that day had on me. I had just turned 13 years old the day before it happened. It was the early days of eighth grade at the United Nations International School, and I wouldn’t have been able to point out Afghanistan on a map let alone correctly pronounce the name “Osama bin Laden” when I read it on CNN.
Growing up in New York City, with a view of the Twin Towers from the apartment that I called home since I was 2 years old, the idea that someone would fly a plane into a building to kill innocent people was more foreign to me than anything. Those things just didn’t happen in my world – the idealistic, uniformed existence of an eighth grade student at a fancy Manhattan private school. Sure, people did horrible things to one another, but somewhere else.
For me, September 11th, 2001 was a day of contrasts. The fanatic cowards who hijacked airplanes to end lives, and the heroic firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers who entered burning buildings to rescue people from danger. The radical extremists who perverted a peaceful religion to justify acts of mass murder, and the charitable citizens who stood in line for up to eight hours to donate blood. The peaceful and vast blue sky that topped off a warm, sunny late-summer day and the thick gray smoke that indicated the death, and destruction that had taken place.
For many of us who were never truly in harms way, the scary part of 9/11 was not where we were, it was not knowing where we were going. As I walked home from school, westbound on 42nd Street, my eyes fixated on the area where the World Trade Center once stood as I crossed each avenue, the prevailing sentiment in the city was one of uncertainty. Fear had largely passed, hope was not quite reachable, and anger was soon to occupy our psyche. Many of us wondered: what is the flaw in humanity that causes people to do a thing like that?
9/11 not only touched lives, it shaped them. Recently, I was sitting in the cafeteria on Capitol Hill finishing lunch when I felt my chair starting to shake. As it intensified, I, like many of the others in the Longworth Cafeteria immediately felt we were under attack, and when we saw people running and screaming “Get out!” it was as good as a death sentence. They got us. But once outside I joked that if a terrorist had attacked the Capitol they would be the dumbest terrorists in history since Congress was in recess, and the Capitol was largely vacant.
But what about us? Despite the obvious reasons why we had little to fear, we all assumed – terrorism. The uncertainty that emerged on September 11th, in many ways, has never left us. Yet in the midst of all the confusion on that day there was a remarkable assumption that we would defeat them, whoever they were. We knew this much, because it is an undeniable fact, that we are better than heartless killers who hide behind and manipulate religion for the sake of violence.
As we reflect today on the incomparable event that occurred ten years ago, many of us will find, that the more we have discovered about ourselves, the more we realize, how little we actually know.
