Since everyone is posting messages about 9/11, I'll tell you mine.
Ten years ago my sister woke me up early in the morning and told me to turn on the television. I was shocked and in disbelief and frightened because my parents were vacationing in Washington D.C. that day. I'm sure you've heard many people describe watching the events on TV as if it were a Hollywood movie. That's what it felt like for me. I saw the footage of the planes striking Tower 1 and 2 over and over again, and I was dumbfounded with what I saw.
I eventually heard from my parents. They were fine. They weren't even aware of what was happening at first because they had been out early in the morning visiting tourist sites. They did notice that there were a lot of ambulances and fire trucks in D.C. My mother said that when they got to the Smithsonian museum they found out because it was closed. They cut their visit short and returned home a few days later when planes began flying again. I believe this was the last time my parents flew on a plane. I could be wrong about that, but I don't recall them flying anywhere again.
Meanwhile, continuing on with my day, I went in to work. In those days, I worked as a pop culture/entertainment news editor serving radio stations, TV stations, and news papers with our lighthearted news. It was a challenge this day to accomplish that. Interviews were canceled in the light of the events, which was totally understandable. Our managing editor was on vacation in Hawaii at the time and was difficult to reach. The newsroom did reach him, and he left it up to us to do what we thought was best. We decided to proceed with our objective, to supply our subscribers with our brand of quirky news.
In retrospect, I'm sure that none of our clients used anything we published over the next few days. That would include a story on 9/13 about a society of bald headed men that hold an annual convention of their bald-headed brethren each year. They believed the patriotic thing to do was continue on with their plans in hopes that "...the light radiating off the bald heads of the conventioneers will be a patriotic beacon for the rest of the world to see."
But this one story of mine was published the very next day. Looking back I think it is interesting that the subject matter revolves around a travel writer and his experiences with an Arabian custom of eating camel for a wedding. You can still find the article archived on an old web site here:
http://internettrash.com/news/getarticle.shtml?/news/2001/09/11/item9.html
Our news took a big shift toward terrorism topics and 9/11 forever after as did the rest of the mainstream media.
Looking back on the event itself, it seems like it was a long time ago. There are 10-year-old children who have never known what it was like to live in a world before the constant threat of terrorist attacks. And now children who were 10 years old at the time are now young adults whose impressionable years have been influenced forever. But it also seems like as a nation, in 10 years, we've made such little progress past the events. So long ago, but we are still covering the same ground over and over again.
