Reflections

For many Americans, today is a day of reflection. . . and remembrance.  

Earlier in my life, people would ask each other, "Do you remember where and what you were doing when John F. Kennedy was assassinated?"

Now, people ask, "Do you remember where and what you were doing when the planes hit the World Trade Center and they went down? "

It is a defining moment in American history.  

I remember the day well.  We were living on the west coast.  My daughters and my husband had left the house a couple of hours earlier.  I was getting ready to leave to go to the university where I was teaching.  My youngest daughter called and told me that the World Trade Center had been bombed.  I stopped and turned on the TV, and watched in horror as the second plane went into one of the Twin Towers.  

I didn't know it then, but there was one person I knew who was in one of the towers at the time.  She was an office worker several floors below where one of the planes crashed into the building.   She survived and later recounted the entire story.  One thing she said has really stuck with me, "The one thing I remember most of all was how there were police and firefighters working tirelessly and selflessly to help people out of the building."    She was blocks away when the first tower collapsed, then the second.  But she remembers hearing sirens of police, firefighters and ambulances racing to the scene and into the fray.  

This is not meant to be political in anyway.  But I can not imagine, in any catastrophe how much worse things would be without police and firefighters.