Living History

My sister wrote a blog about what 9/11 means to her as a member of the military. I thought I would write one from my point of view: a historian’s.

The idea of what history is, what a historian does and how one looks as history have been banging around my brain these last few weeks. In History 500, we’ve been talking about how a historian studies history and one of the ways that you have to do that is get rid of all your biases. We cannot inflict our biases of the present into the past. So how do we look at 9/11 without a bias? It’s near impossible to try and put ourselves back into the mindset of those thousands of people on the streets and apartments of New York City, the Pentagon and Flight 93 on that fateful day.

Yesterday I watched a History Channel Documentary called “102 Minutes that Changed America”. Ever single shot is comprised of footage from normal people on the streets. While watching this, I tried to put myself into their mind and found it difficult.

When the first plane hit, the response seemed to be strictly emotional- confusion, shock, concern, questions. No one had ever really seen anything like it before.

It’s impossible to watch without thinking: you poor, unsuspecting people. The nightmare you are about to encounter is unimaginable.

And then the second plane hits. The emotions change to fear and anger. One is an accident, two is an attack. Two is not a coincidence- it’s a thought-out attack. Words that we now bandy about willy-nilly- words like Al-Quaida, Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Taliban- are just far away people and places, things the general populace hardly even knows about.

Firemen, police officers, security guards, EMTs, FBI from all over the city flood towards the towers. With precision and authority they outstretch miles and miles of house. Fire extinguishers are lined up outside the lobbies. The police keep moving civilians out of the way, moving them farther and farther away from the towers. Reporters in the choppers mention that it looks like the fires are starting to abate.

What makes things just a little worse that they already are is if you zoomed back from the scene, you’d see a gorgeous blue sky, not a cloud in sight, green parks dotted amongst the house and buildings. A beautiful scene if not for the black scar now burning on the New York City skyline.

And again, it’s impossible to watch today without three words going through your head over and over again: they’re gonna fall…. They’re gonna fall…. They’re gonna fall….

And they do. Nobody expected this. All the crews were thinking about was getting into the towers and rescuing those that were waving flags out of the windows, calling 911, getting up all of the hundreds of stairs to bring people down. The second tower hit goes first. It’s down in a second and people start running. Following close at their heels is a huge cloud of ash, soot, smoke, dirt and debris. Within a minute, a five-block radius of lower Manhattan is transformed into a nuclear disaster zone. People are covered in gray ash, the streets look like a light snow has fallen, nobody can breathe, mad chaos ensues as people run away from the site and firefighters, spines as stiff as ramrods, march towards the site, still intent on saving people, despite being dazed and uncertain.

And then the second one goes, falling straight down on itself. It’s strangely artistically beautiful, if it wasn’t so horribly terrifying.

What to do now? The World Trade Center plaza is filled with debris, papers, burning pieces of the building, dust, and ash. Firemen and police officers survey the scene. How is this all going to get cleaned up? How will we ever recover? How will be rebuild? They don’t know it at the time but it will get cleaned up. It will cost lives, lungs and the health of those involved but it was get cleaned up. And

People on the street are being interviewed. They are crying. They are angry. They are confused. Many declare that war must be declared. Would they still be saying the same ten years later, as we are still entrenched in a war in two different countries with no end in sight? Again, that is putting our present biases into the minds of those living in the past.

Ten years later, we try to look back and make sense of all the pieces. We try to put ourselves into the minds and bodies of those who experienced 9/11 in front of their eyes. We try to answer the still unanswered hundreds of questions. As historians, we keep our eyes firmly fixed on the past but continue to move forward. By watching what has happened and simultaneously gathering new information as each day, week, month, year, decade, century go by, we piece together the puzzle and discover new answer to these questions. They may not all every be answered. But I do know that if we takes our eyes away from the past and allow it to die, our present dies along with it. Our future dies along with it. That is the lesson of 9/11. There is no way of undoing what happened on that day ten years ago. But we must accept it as part of who we know are and who we continue to become each day.