History

I remember September 11th as a very strange and horrible day. I was in still in grade school, only 9 years old. It started off as any normal day. We were talking about the civil war. Then, an hour or so after school had started, children in my class started disappearing. Usually, if a kid gets called out of class, all the other students were extremely jealous and wished they were being called out of school too. Well, about 3/4 of the class got their wish that day because frantic and panicked parents grabbed their children out of school faster than the teacher could keep count. By midday, everyone knew something was up, but the teachers just smiled and kept us ignorant to the evils of the world. Now that I think about it, the teachers must have had an extreme amount of strength to keep their cool. Anyway, when I finally got off the bus and started walking home, I had no idea anything drastic was going on. I walked into my mom's room and saw her crying her eyes out watching the rerun of the massive terrorist attack. She called my older brother and I to her and she hugged us for the next hour and tried to explain what had happened.
I asked my mom what her experience of that day was. She told me she had gone to work like any other normal day. Around 9:15 people at her office started flipping out, and everyone was running around like beheaded chickens. They all gathered around the office television and watched the horror that looked like a Hollywood prank. Most workers, including my mom, left work early to go get their kids out of school. But after she got on the highway (along with the rest of northern virginia) she decided it would be safer and easier to just let us ride the bus home. For my mom, it was a much more frightening experience because she was older, wiser, and experienced. I was just a child. She had the fear I would have had if it had happened yesterday. She was also afraid that Washington was in danger because of the attack on the Pentagon, and we were extremely close to Washington.
It's interesting to see my mother's experience with 9/11 compared to mine. I was only a child. I didn't know what a terrorist was. I didn't know how detrimental the attack was until sometime later. I didn't understand why this incident caused schools across America to have a moment of silence every day and listen to "God Bless America" for the rest of the 2001-2002 school year. But now I realize just how devastating the attack was on our country.