Tuesdays are pretty busy days for papers that come out on Wednesday. So, being a Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 was typically hectic.
That’s probably why my boss was a little upset when I got up out of my chair and walked over to the News & Observer’s side of the newsroom and turned on the TV.
The ticker on my desktop had alerted me to the first strike. Photographer Grant Halverson and I watched the second awful strike. A few minutes later, Grant and I were on our way to campus, going straight to the South Building as the chancellor’s cabinet assembled. I waited on the steps overlooking Polk Place as people made their way into the building. Emotions seemed to range from deep sadness to outright grief. The dean of students, with family in the city, was sobbing. The undergraduate dean of arts and sciences had her arm around her. Grant and I were allowed into the meeting for a while, not a normal thing, and witnessed preparations, briefings and some very human moments.
We went down to the student union and encountered the most gut-wrenching scene. Nearly everyone coming out of the building was in some kind of distress, many in tears. Most were stepping out to make calls, trying to connect, leaving desperate messages.
Inside, huge crowds full of individuals expressing raw, open emotion were gathered around the screens showing things in real time. That was the only moment I got to see what had happened since leaving the newsroom. I watched a tower fall – can’t say which one – and went back outside.
By the end of the day, my colleagues and I had talked to dozens of people. People were far more candid and personal that day. I remember Rep. David Price, who had just made it back to his apartment, describing the smoke rising from the Pentagon and an elementary school teacher recalling her talk with students.
At the end of the day, it was my job to assemble the other reporters’ interviews and information and to write a top to the story. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to really think about it, and I was weary, worn out and just wanted to go home. The first sentence was kind of personal, but reflected the notions of almost everyone we’d talked to. It went something like, “There was a struggle here Tuesday to make sense of it all.â€
Now, nine years out, that’s still the case and, judging from recent events, that illusive goal of making sense of it all seems even more remote.
I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of Carolina than in how it handled the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the South Building that day, there was a profound sadness because reason itself had lost a battle. From the service the next day to teach-ins to the attempts to educate and emphasize that the enemy was not a religion but violent zealots, the university community rose to its calling as a champion of reason.
But just as the attacks brought out the best in us, they also brought out the worst. Within a couple of months, I was covering stories about academic blacklists and wholesale firings of Latinos triggered by a provision in the Patriot Act.
And over the years, the ministrations of a host of demagogues have successfully re-instilled fear of the other as a societal norm. With Sept. 11 as an icon, the idea that “our way of life is under attack†is not a difficult sale.
We are better than that as a people, but we aren’t, it seems, “a people†any more than we are of many camps, each distrustful, if not openly hostile, to one another.
A fertile time for zealots – within and without.
— Kirk Ross