What are your personal memories of September 11th?
I was thinking about this on my drive in to work this morning.
I was in class at the time. It was my Junior year of college. I had a computer class – something on MS Office. We were all sitting and working on class stuff when the professor’s daughter came in and said something. So then we all tried to get on the internet, only to discover that all the major news sites were down. That freaked me out more than anything – I thought something even bigger had happened. We were able to get snippets from Yahoo! Headlines, but not the actual articles. After that class, I went and stood in the University Center and watched the TV they had hanging there….there was a big crowd. I was there for about 10 minutes, then I went to my next class. That professor said “Yes, there are major things happening, and it’s scary, but there’s nothing *we* can do from here, so we’re having class like normal”. I actually appreciated that because it kept me from totally freaking out before we knew what had happened. I think I spent the rest of the day glued to the TV with my roommates.
I do remember seeing loads of people watching the TV in the UC in the following weeks, and when the president spoke, everyone shut up. I knew it must be major if everyone shut up to hear the president instead of talking all the way through.
My roommate and I went to give blood the next week. I couldn’t because I had been in Europe less than 6 months before, but she was able to.
I also remember us talking about what would happen if East Tennessee was targeted because of Oak Ridge. We lived in Chattanooga, which isn’t really all that far from Knoxville (when you’re talking nukes and bombs, anyway) and we decided that we’d probably be goners. There’s a nuclear power plant just outside Chattanooga, too.
I also remember my 3 roommates and I all gathering to watch the latest presidential address or other news and then discussing it. Those are some of my favorite memories of college, because we were able to have reasonable discussions about all sorts of things. I really missed that when I moved in to my own place.
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