Thirteen years ago today on a clear and bright Tuesday morning, something very strange happened. Every non-military aircraft in the United States was grounded. Never in the history of US aviation had something like that been ordered, and it never has been since.
That day, America suffered the most deadly terrorist attack in her history. Militants from the terrorist group Al Qaeda had hijacked four commercial flights. The first two crashed into the World Trade Center’s North and South Towers in New York, a third struck the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania. In the end, 2,996 people were killed in the attacks. For those of us who were old enough to understand the gravity of those events, it is a day we will never forget. I sat down with Father Chris to hear some of his memories of that day.
Father Chris was in his room at the rectory at St. Mary’s in Dedham when he first heard the news. He was preparing for a “day of leisure” (I’m almost certain that’s a euphemism for golf) at the time. His first thought was for the teens of LifeTeen Dedham. The LifeHouse was under a two week shutdown to help the teens get back into the swing of school. Father Chris called Dedham High School and asked that they announce that the Life House would be open for all so that no one would have to go home to an empty house. He recalled that many, including non-Catholics and Catholics who had never come to LifeTeen, showed up that day. There was a teen at Dedham High who was teased by a classmate when he said he was going to the Life House. In response to his teasing, the teen asked “Do you want to come with me?” They both went.
After a discussion with Bishop Dooher (who at the time was still Father Dooher) it was decided that they should hold a Mass that evening. Despite the lack of social media to spread the word (this was 2001, two years before Tom launched MySpace, and even further before Facebook as we know it), the Church was full.
Twenty miles away in Hanover, a different scene was unfolding. My friend and neighbor, Greg, had come into school late that day telling outrageous stories about planes crashing into buildings in New York. Greg had a history of telling tall tales, and nobody really believed what he had to say. When I reached Mrs. K’s algebra class, my second to last class of the day, an announcement came over the loudspeaker. It said that a “terrible thing” had happened, and the busses were outside waiting to bring us home. One by one we all thought the same thing.
Maybe Greg was telling the truth. No. This must be something else.
The bus driver, a product of the Cold War, quieted us and told us that the Russians had bombed the White House, the Pentagon, Camp David, New York, and “a bunch of other places.” Confusion ruled the day. It was days before all the facts were sorted out and shared with us. Conspiracy theories ran rampant. A few kids on the back of the bus joked that Pedro Martinez was behind the attacks in New York, (it would be three more years before “The Curse of the Bambino” would be broken) and I joined in.
When the bus dropped us off at our street, we ran home watching the sky. A military jet flew overhead and we all secretly feared that it was an enemy plane that had come to blow up our neighborhood. It wasn’t. We all reached our houses safely. My mother was watching the news and crying. It was the first time I had ever seen her do that. I wouldn’t see it again until my great uncle Charlie passed away my junior year of high school. I sat with her watching the news for a while. The man on TV said that 30,000 were dead. In the coming weeks, that number would drop to 3,000, but that still wasn’t enough to offer any comfort. When I couldn’t take any more, I asked her if I could go up to my room. She said I could, so I went up and put on SpongeBob SquarePants.
For a long time I was embarrassed and ashamed of my actions that afternoon. A few years ago, though, I realized that I wasn’t alone. Few were able to face what had taken place head on. Those of us who didn’t have that kind of strength just tried to escape reality. My thirteen year old mind wasn’t ready to deal with that kind of terrible violence. My young eyes couldn’t handle the images of the explosions, the kind you’d see in movies, anymore. My heart couldn’t handle the pain of seeing all those people running in their dust covered business suits with unadulterated fear fixed on their faces like masks; people whose only crime had been going to work that morning to earn a living for their families. I couldn’t bear to watch it, so I didn’t. I dealt with the trauma the only way I could, by trying to ignore it.
In the days after the attacks of September 11
th, it felt like the world stopped. Radio stations didn’t play music for a long time. Television channels seemed to run the news nonstop. Professional sports teams cancelled their games. Late night TV hosts like David Letterman and Jay Leno didn’t host their shows. Eventually, President Bush told the country that it was time to return to “normalcy,” a word which has since been added to our dictionaries. Slowly, the world as we knew it restarted.
But it would never be quite the same for any of us again.
In
East Of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that “time works like a damp brush on water color. The sharp edges blur, the ache goes out of it, the colors melt together, and from the many separated lines a solid gray emerges.” Many of the readers of this post will have been too young to remember the events of September 11, 2001 clearly. To them, it is not a horror they watched unfolding on live television. It is something they read about in a history textbook. That gives me a tremendous hope; a hope that someday our collective conscious might once again feel safe, a hope that the brush of time might sweep across our memories and dim the ache. Until that day, though, our nation will live with the phantom pain of nearly three thousand men, women, and children amputated by people who hated us without knowing us.
Terrorists are made, not born. It’s hard to believe, but they start out just like any one of us: bright eyed children with a family they love. They played in streets with their friends, and at night they dreamed of the boy or girl next door. They looked at the stars and were filled with awe. They spent hours imagining their first kiss. They came up with names for their children and thought about how they would raise them. Then, somewhere along the line, something went terribly wrong. Either political instability, or poverty, or turmoil in their family, or some other calamity robbed them of their lives as they knew them. Then they were brainwashed by a false religion. Not Islam, which is a peaceful religion that embraces the golden rule, but a grotesque monster masquerading as Islam. This imposter to Islam poisoned their souls. It blinded them so that evil looked like good, and good looked like evil. Then they acted.
Jesus told us to pray for our enemies. It was not an empty statement, but a commandment. It is my hope that this September 11
th, after praying for the victims and their families, that the readers of this post will say a short prayer for all those who are involved with, or are considering becoming involved with, terrorist groups. We should pray that God heal the sickness in their souls, and open their eyes so that they might see the difference between good and evil, and choose to follow good. We should pray that they abandon false religion and recognize the God of love. If not for their sakes, then we should pray for our own and the sake of our world. I know it’s hard, but hate won’t ever be able to defeat terrorism. Only love has the power to do that.