Never forget

This post has almost nothing to do with the St Louis Cardinals. I would apologize for that, but given the context and the relevance of today, I don’t feel it’s necessary. On September 11, 2001, I was waiting for the school bus my sophomore year of high school. The school bus stopped to pick up myself and my fellow students. The car behind it apparently failed to see the flashing red lights and crashed into the back of the school bus. Thankfully, neither the car nor the bus were traveling that fast so there was no damage done in the accident and no one was injured. As I walked onto the school bus, I turned to a friend of mine and said “I have a feeling this is going to be a really weird day.”
School that day was going the same as any other day. When I got into my third hour US history class, though, my teacher had a TV set in his room with the news on and looked shell-shocked. He told all of the students to sit down and watch the news report that was on the television because something very important and very bad had happened. We all learned about the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Some schools let out early; ours did not. Many students walked around like zombies because they had relatives that lived in New York. For others, the importance of the situation never seemed to set in.

When I got home, my mom had gotten off work early and had been watching the news all day. She looked just as mesmerized as my history teacher. Over the next few weeks, we all learned exactly what had happened and exactly who had perpetrated the attack.

Regardless of your political stance and whether you think the situation was handled accordingly or not, one thing is for certain. The American spirit was tested that day, but not destroyed. You can say what you will about where we are as a society, but the American people moved on from that day and showed the resilience necessary to keep this nation strong.