9/11: Humanity Amidst Evil
There was a lot of hurt on September 11th. Even before the tragedy, only a few days had passed since my family returned from my father’s funeral in Hawaii. On top of that, we had only recently moved into a new house- boxes were still lying around waiting to be unpacked. Otherwise, it was just a normal day. I had to go to Carlisle Elementary School at the beginning of the day. An intern that I was supervising was assigned there, and I was supposed to help him out with a tough case. On the way out there, a message came on the radio saying that a small airplane had hit one of the Twin Towers. I thought it was weird, but I don’t think I realized- I don’t think anyone realized- the scope of what was really happening.  When I got to the school, the secretary told me about the other tower. I don’t think anyone realized what was really going on. There I was, sitting in the office of a small school in a small town in Iowa discussing a kid while thousands of miles away people were suffering and dying.
I arrived at my office around 11:00. When I got there, one of my friends stopped me.
“Did you hear about what’s going on?” he asked.
“Yeah, there was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center,” I replied. “Scary, yeah?”
“That’s not all. There was a plane headed for the White House- it ended up crashing in Pennsylvania.”
“Wow.”
All I could think was how unbelievable it was. Everyone was gathered around one of the TVs in the lobby watching CNN. It really was surreal. There was a kind of mood in the office of shock and disbelief. I myself couldn’t believe what just happened. I couldn’t believe it when the towers just collapsed on themselves; to say it was frightening doesn’t even really do it justice. What was even worse was the footage of the people jumping out of the buildings. they were so desperate that they were jumping. It was so unreal- if it hadn’t been in front of me on the TV right then, I might have thought it was a dream. For about an hour, everyone was gathered in the lobby, watching the footage. After that, everyone trickled back to their offices and started watching the news websites. CNN, MSN, those places. Then 4 o’clock rolled around, and I headed home. When I got home, I put on a video for the kids to watch and headed upstairs to watch the news. They’re too young to see this, I told myself. Every night for weeks, I would come home and turn on CNN. But that night in particular, I couldn’t look away. I heard stories about the missing people. That was so sad to me. You would hear about all of the people searching for the missing people and I just didn’t know how long they would keep looking. It was so, so sad. And to really get a scope on how bad this really was at the time- the initial estimate of deaths was something just insane, somewhere from 20,000 people to 50,000. The final death count was somewhere around 2,000, but I mean, can you imagine how panicked you must be if you’re living in New York City on 9/11? The entire city just came to a stop. Wherever you were, you were stuck. You couldn’t get home, the subways were off, and I mean, I just wondered what I would do if I was in New York on that day. Actually, I talked to a friend from New York just a couple months later, and he told me about how strange it was seeing the skyline at the end of the day and not seeing the Twin Towers,like there was a massive hole in the skyline, he said, and all there was to fill it was smoke.
	I remember five years ago, going to New York City with the family for a few days and visiting Ground Zero. And going back to what my friend said, the World Trade Center towers were such a widely known silhouette, popular in films and TV shows and the like. But then, it was just gone.
	At one church near Ground Zero, there was this little monument to firefighters who died in 9/11. There were pictures, and badges from other fire stations around the nation. I remember watching the footage, watching the firefighters and the EMTs run into the building, knowing full well they would never come out. But they still ran into that building. They still ran into that building. It was incredible to watch, that amidst all of this evil and destruction, there was humanity. That’s what I really took home from September 11th.