{"id":14705,"date":"2011-09-10T21:03:51","date_gmt":"2011-09-11T02:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=14705"},"modified":"2011-09-11T11:14:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-11T16:14:00","slug":"a-child-remembers-911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2011\/09\/a-child-remembers-911\/","title":{"rendered":"A Child Remembers 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was driving to work on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, talking on my cell phone with my mother.\u00a0 Suddenly, she interrupted our conversation to say that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center buildings.\u00a0 My first thought was probably like the thoughts of many others who heard the news second-hand:\u00a0 it must have been a small plane, a Cessna maybe, an inexperienced pilot or some mechanical error.\u00a0 Surely an accident.\u00a0 A few minutes later, my mother exclaimed, \u201cOh my God, another plane hit the other tower!\u201d\u00a0Then she hung up.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until I got to work and huddled around a TV with my colleagues that I fully understood what had happened. In a hushed room with several others, I watched in horror, my mouth agape, as the Towers crumbled, as people ran through the streets of Manhattan, thick smoke filling the streets behind them.\u00a0 It looked like a scene you\u2019d see from somewhere else, somewhere across the world.\u00a0 But not here.<\/p>\n

Those of us with young children at home struggled with what to tell them, what to let them see and hear. What do you say to a child who has hardly seen or experienced much of the world outside his home, his community, his state, that allows him to understand the magnitude of 9\/11?\u00a0 What do you say to let him know the larger world can be unpredictable and scary and dangerous, but so that you don\u2019t scare him into never experiencing that larger world?<\/p>\n

In the days after the attack, when the skies were so very still and quiet and the national mood somber, the school my eldest son attended requested that students come wearing red, white, or blue.\u00a0 They lined up the children, a couple hundred third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders, on the spacious lawn next to the school, lined them up in so that their bodies spelled \u201cWE [heart] USA,\u201d and then they took a picture.\u00a0 I have a laminated copy, long and narrow, like a bookmark.\u00a0 I can easily pick out my son, clad in a red t-shirt, forming the bottom of the \u201cE\u201d in \u201cWE.\u201d<\/p>\n

I look at that picture now and think about those children gathered on the grass, sporting red, white, or blue, understanding but not quite understanding.\u00a0 Old enough to know that something big and terrible has happened, but perhaps not quite understanding how big, how terrible, how it would change the world.\u00a0 I asked my son Rob, now a 19-year-old college student, what he remembers about that day and the days shortly after.\u00a0 Here is his response:<\/p>\n

Most of my memories of 9\/11 do not actually come from the day itself, but those following, as I did not hear the news until late that evening. I was too young to notice or understand any changes in my teacher\u2019s behavior, and she did not inform us of the news, leaving our parents to break the news when we returned home. Even then, as my parents attempted to explain the news, and I saw some new footage, I did not feel like I fully comprehended what had just happened, except that it was apparently very bad.<\/p>\n

The next day, things became a little clearer, as we had a \u201ccircle discussion\u201d in my classroom at school. I can\u2019t remember anymore the words the teacher used to describe what happened.\u00a0 Even though it was explained to us, I did not feel many of us really began to understand the implications. Some children didn\u2019t care or didn\u2019t understand, some became enflamed with patriotism, as much a 4th <\/sup>grader could muster, anyway. Our school began to instill that feeling of patriotism and asked all students to partake in the creation of a large message of bodies proclaiming in red, white, and blue, that we love the USA.<\/p>\n

Though the larger implications of 9\/11 were lost on me at the time, I recognized it as the spur that created a time of intense nationalism that became a theme of my childhood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was driving to work on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, talking on my cell phone with my mother.\u00a0 Suddenly, she interrupted our conversation to say that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center buildings.\u00a0 My first thought was probably like the thoughts of many others who heard the news […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}