I Thought 9/11 Had United Us
Instead, it exposed our divisions.
I slept over my friend’s house on September 10. The next morning, my dad called. I didn’t pick up the phone. He had woken me up, and I wanted to keep sleeping. It wasn’t that early, but, hey, I was a junior in college.
“What if it was something important?” my friend asked.
“Nah, it’s not.”
A minute later, my friend’s phone rang. She listened without saying a word, turned to me and opened her mouth wide, in apparent shock.
“Shut up,” I said, convinced she was trying to teach me a lesson about not answering my dad’s call.
She hung up the phone.
“Our country is under attack,” she said.
When she turned on the TV, I realized she wasn’t pretending.
I remember watching CNN and FOX (back when one could do both) around the clock with my roommates. The bombastic orchestral themes would thunder and swell, and the camera would push in on po-faced anchors who doled out updates about the hunt for the culprit. We leaned forward, agog. We wanted justice — no, we wanted revenge.
It felt so clean and simple back then. Someone had perpetrated an unspeakable act on American soil. You can’t just walk into our house, break shit…
