This Monday will be five years. CNN will be running a flashback program on the air in real time and CNN Pipeline will be doing the same on-line. This was obviously a seminal event for most people around the world and takes its place in my own memories among other events such as John Glenn orbiting the earth, the Kennedy assasinations, the shuttle disasters, and the list goes on. I remember what I was doing when each of these things happened, and they mark the march of time in my own life. I do NOT mean to make this a political commentary or light the fuses of opinion for debate. I'd just like to know what you were doing, where you were when 9/11 happened, and how it touched your lives.
My story:
I was at work in my office here in Little Rock at the airport preparing for our weekly sales meeting, when a co-worker walked by and mentioned that a '747' had 'accidently' hit one of the towers of the WTC. This immediately struck me as too weird to be true, since how would one 'accidently' fly an airliner into the WTC in broad daylight? We have a crew lounge downstairs here for visitors, so I went down to watch the rest of what happened unfold throughout the morning on the TV there. It was a very crowded room. The events which happened that day were so enormous that they seemed surreal, and the reality didn't impact me emotionally until the lonely drive home when I saw all the airliners parked along the runway and I passed the churches with their signs that said, 'God Bless The USA", and 'Pray For Our Nation.' The tears started a few blocks from home as it hit me that we would never again be the same, and that the events of that day made ALL Americans New Yorkers and the nations of the world ALL one people. How quickly this passed, and how soon we seem to have forgotten the lessons of that day.
