Today is 9-11 and the 22nd anniversary of that awful day. How did you change after 9-11? Were the changes lasting, or did you gradually go back to the way you were before 9-11-01?
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I became much more sensitive to civil liberties after seeing friends questioned or mistreated just because of their ethnicity.
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I grew up around NYC. Many friends were impacted directly and lost family members. The ongoing violence in this country just continues to reinforce to me that safety is an illusion. Life can change in an instant. That’s never gone away for me.
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Things definitely changed after 9-11. Flights became more difficult. Our trust became less. We felt like we had a common enemy.
In hindsight, the fact that the country felt United is something that I wish we still felt.
For me personally, 2016 changed everything. It was a different kind of pain.
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I have heard this a lot from friends and family but it’s not true. We were not united. We lived in NJ at the time and I saw how some immigrant communities were disrupted due to our “unity”. They were as American as you or me, but it didn’t matter.
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Very true.
I realized that I was the same age, 39, on 9/11 as my grandmother was when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I had three young children at the time and she had two. I wish I had talked to her about her feelings on that day. I definitely became more fearful for my children’s futures. When my three-year-old daughter saw me crying, she said, “Are you sad, Mommy?” OMG, what can you say?
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I was a college student on my way to work. My part time job was making hotel reservations at a call center. I went to turn on the radio to check the news, and that’s when I heard that one of the twin towers had already collapsed, and the other one was on fire. When I got in, they told me to go straight to work. One call was especially miraculous. This gentleman was stranded at the airport and needed to cancel because his flight was grounded. When I looked at his rewards profile, I saw he worked on the 99th floor of the World Trade Center. I’ve never seen anyone so happy to be stranded at an airport.
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It’s when my young children learned that Pearl Harbor happened in Hawaii, not near Queens NY. My mother had such emotion with the memories of that day that kids just assumed it had happened on the mainland.
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