As much as we have learned from family, teachers, and friends, the truth is that we high schoolers don’t know much about 9-11, just as our children and grandchildren won’t truly understand the COVID-19 pandemic because they were not there. We did not experience 9-11 firsthand. To truly understand the impact of this event, I asked two people who lived through this tragedy if they would be willing to share their stories. Thankfully they were willing to share their experiences with me.
The first person I spoke to was Mr. Hale, and as many Minnechaug students can tell you, he made an amazing announcement on September 11 about the tragedies of that day. The other Minnechaug staff member I interviewed regarding this important historical event was Ms. Rice, a teacher in the Math Department.
Mr. Hale was 30 years old at the time of the attacks serving as the principal of Saint Johns Baptist Catholic School in Ludlow. This event shocked him as he could never have predicted the tragic events of that day especially since the last attack on American soil occurred almost 60 years before with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
On this day in September 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists took control of four commercial airplanes beginning with their attack on the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, followed by the South Tower, then the Pentagon, and finally the crashing of the fourth plane in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. When asked what the scariest part of that day was Mr. Hale replied that it was “not knowing how many planes were hijacked and how many might crash.”
The fear of the unknown is inevitably the scariest part of any tragedy, but it also has the potential to bring people together in mutual grief. Ms. Rice was a new mother in her mid-thirties when the nation was attacked on 9/11. In the aftermath of the attack, she noticed an increase in kindness as she watched the world around her heal.
When asked what she hopes people will take away from this tragic event Rice believes that we shouldn’t wait for such a tragedy to be kind to each other. “I remember the feeling in the air after the first couple weeks, people were kindly holding doors, and smiling at each other in the grocery store,” said Rice.
Human understanding should be an everyday priority, not just a once-in-a-while treat. Mr. Hale knows this, and his announcement on September 11th was a way to spread this message of kindness. When asked what inspired him to make this announcement he said that there were “two things, one is to ensure that the current students who weren’t born at the time know the significant impact that September 11th had on the country and the second is to encourage empathy for the adults in the building who were alive when it happened.”
We as high school students will never experience the multitude of emotions that September 11th, 2001 brought forth for many of the adults around us. The best thing we can do is to spread kindness and understanding because as Ms. Rice said, we don’t need another tragedy to be kind to one another.