It is pretty safe to say that we’ve observed a very important and devastating event in our country’s history. When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers fourteen years ago last Friday, I was six years old and in preschool. Unlike other people, I can’t remember what happened at school or what I did when it happened. From my young perspective, I just knew we weren’t celebrating my Uncle’s birthday the way we normally would. However, my biggest memories of 9/11 happened years later.
In 2011, I went to New York with my grandparents and one of the stops we made was the 9/11 Memorial that had just opened. At this time, they were still building the Freedom Tower. I knew what had happened there, I knew that there were a lot of people that were impacted by 9/11. However, I didn’t have my mind wrapped exactly how many people were affected by the tragedy. Yes, there are pictures of everything, pictures showing us what happened and pictures showing us the memorial they made in honor of it. No picture of the two fountains tell you how you’re going to feel when you see them.
When I saw the names the first thing I thought about was the font size. I was writing for our local paper, so I liked to take notice of details like that. The font size of all of the names on the fountain were small to me and it was overwhelming to think of how many names it would take to fill the entire surface. Not to mention how many there had to be to fill both of them! However, the people around me were seeing all of this differently. To them, they were seeing people. They were seeing their friends, family, firemen, police officers, all kinds of people. It wasn’t until a year and a half later until that clicked with me.
Spring Break 2014 was when my senior class went to New York for our senior trip. This time, we had went through the museum portion before the memorial. Then gravity of what happened rushed over me. When you go there, you think it’s going to be like any other museum. There are pictures and diagrams of the towers before the planes came and telling what had happened. Until you look closely at the exhibits and see that the walls are decorated with voicemails people had received from their loved ones right before they died. Some of them were from people on the plane that wanted to call and tell their families they loved them. Others were men calling their wives to pick of groceries or their kids from school. Some of them had no idea what was going to happen to them, that they were going to be a part of one of the biggest tragedies in American history.
My perspective doesn’t come from the eyes of a young child who didn’t fully understand. I was so unaware that I didn’t fully realize there was anything wrong. It took me ten years to fully grasp what had happened. There is never a bad time to learn about what had happened, or to learn more. This was still a time in our history that brought us together to support each other. A time where we all became a family to build each other up. We can take this time to listen to the others around us and to learn from all of the different perspectives of the people around us.
