I never thought I would see the day the tragedy of 9/11 would be a bullet point for history text books. I remember that September day very well.
September 11, 2001: Around the time that the first plane struck the first tower, I was in my 3rd-grade classroom. Ms. Kennedy assigned us our spelling test, which consisted of 10 words we needed to learn how to spell. We were all in the dark until a little after 9:00 that morning.
Over the intercom, our principal instructed the teachers not to turn on the televisions or radios. The idea was to protect the children from something so horrific as an airplane crashing into the North Tower. By that time, the second plane hit the South Tower. Ms. Kennedy tried her best to keep our young minds in the dark for as long as possible, but it was difficult when the adults realized it was intentional and not an accident.
It was after the second attack Ms. Kennedy felt the need to tell her students what was happening in New York. She basically said some airplanes flew into some buildings, and some people were hurt.
During recess, a boy I knew told me an airplane hit the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Looking back on this, we didn’t know any other buildings in New York. I grew up in Georgia, and I still don’t think I know all the buildings in New York, even after visiting.
It wasn’t until I got home from school that I learned what happened that day. In New York, buildings collapsed. In D.C., there was a hole in the side of the Pentagon. A plane crash landed in Pennsylvania crash-landed after the brave Americans took over the hijacked plane.
My mother watched CNN from 8:46 that morning until nearly 8:00 that evening. Panic across North America and the United States bloomed into something I will never forget. There was the anthrax scare and the thought that any plane could be a terroristic attack.
A year later, when I was in the fourth grade, my teacher, Ms. Shields, told us that the events that happened the year prior would one day be in history textbooks. I never would have thought I saw that day. My father, who lived through the Kennedy assassination, felt the same when he was younger. When my younger brother was learning American History, I saw the attacks on 9/11 as a subject point.
For me, that was the day that the United States changed. And I don’t know if it was for the good. We have a lot of hate as a country. And we hate those different than ourselves. Instead of lifting up those who are different, we hate and must control them. Many Muslim Americans were hated after those events. It is almost reminiscent of the Japanese concentration camps after the events of Pearl Harbor.
Ethan Bridges-Garcia 
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