Today marks 10 years since that WTF moment that changed the lives of everyone in this country. Consequently, it was 10 years ago today that I was supposed to have the first night of massage school. At least they had the sense enough to cancel classes that evening.
There are certain events that happen in our lives that imprint themselves on us so that we can remember them years, decades later to the smallest detail. These I call Life Imprinting WTF moments (or LIWTF). I have had three of those in my lifetime. And I really hope I don't have any more.
The first one was November 22nd, 1963, the assassination of president Kennedy. I was sitting in my fourth grade class. I can see the faces of the other children sitting around me. It was late afternoon, a half hour or so before dismissal. The teacher, Mr. Zeller, had been called to the office. On his return, he told us what had happened. He let us do whatever we wanted for the rest of the day. We sat there in shocked silence. To someone that young, this was a horrible shock.
I remember not understanding much of it. There was nothing on TV other than coverage of things going on for days, and then, there weren't the multitude of channels thatwe have nowadays. I remember watching as a hat moved through a crowd and the accused assassin was shot dead. I remember several days with no school, trapped in the house with nothing going on wondering what it all meant.
The second LIWTF moment was January 28th, 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff. I was working at Church Hospital in Baltimore. I was making my rounds and passing through the Accounting department when someone stepped out of their office and shouted that the space shuttle blew up. Someone had a radio on and we listened to the details.
It was a horrible shock. For a science fiction fan, watching the progression of the space program was watching the reality slowly become the dream. To see something like this happen was a tremendous shock. Through the entire space program, there had been setbacks, but never one so big and shocking.
Among the crew was a civilian billed as the first teacher in space. Watching the shock on her parents' faces and the faces of the students of her class as they watched the launch. Those are images that I will never forget.
And then there came 9/11. I was sitting at my desk, working as a computer programmer for the Jacksonville Jaguars. My wife called me and told me she had heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. I told her that I would call her back, and I walked down to our internet programmers' office as they had a TV there. I turned it on and saw the shocking video of a large passenger plane plowing into one of the two towers.
I called my wife and let her know, then I walked down the hall and told my boss to turn his TV on. A little later, I got a call from my massage school and was told that classes were cancelled for that evening. This was a very ominous way to start a massage career.
From that point on, it was constant news, watching the same footage over and over again, unwilling to tear ourselves away from the television. The person i shared an office with brought in a small TV and we watched it all day long, and all night once I got home from school.
The changes in our lives from that point on are still being felt. We see them in heightened security at airports, increased government control, and a new branch called Homeland Security.
We still feel the echoes of the fear that we felt that day, the worry that we can never be safe. We saw that we lived our lives in blissful, naive security, not knowing what was really out there. Now that unknown is all we think about.
I can only hope that this is the last LIWTF moment I will have to encounter in this life as each one seems to be a major tragedy.
Today, we look back to 10 years ago when two tall, proud buildings came plummeting to earth, and the lives of over 3,000 people were stopped short, and the lives of millions changed forever. We ask that light come in to where the darkness exists, and that events like these never happen again.