Lilly Simmering
This year, our nation marks 25 years since the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, which took the lives of thousands of innocent people and changed our country forever.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was a second-year law student in Orange County, Calif. I had grown accustomed to watching NBC’s “Today” show each morning to catch up on the day’s news. That morning was no different.
I remember walking back into my living room and seeing the first tower on fire. I still distinctly remember struggling to put on my backpack when the second plane struck the second tower. For more than a minute, my mind could not comprehend that what I was watching was not a Hollywood movie, but a tragedy unfolding in real time.
My best friend was working in Washington, D.C. After learning that the Pentagon had been hit, I could not reach her. I began calling other friends in the area and eventually reached one who described mayhem: smoke in the sky, mass confusion and our nation’s capital effectively shut down.
Later that night, I sat on the beach and noticed how eerily quiet the skies had become. There were no airplanes lined up to land at Los Angeles International Airport or John Wayne Airport. For a moment, the world was literally still.
When I moved to Washington, D.C., in 2005, the memories of 9/11 had not faded for those who had experienced it there. On my first day at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, just across the Potomac from the Pentagon, I was handed an emergency survival bag containing protein bars, water, a foil blanket, first-aid supplies and other essentials. It was there in case another emergency forced me to walk the roughly 25 miles home to Fairfax, Va.
The anxiety remained palpable. Even an unattended bag on the Metro could cause an entire train car to become silent as passengers exchanged worried looks and quietly considered whom they would call first if something happened.
Twenty-five years later, my children know Sept. 11 much differently. All born years afterward, they understand 9/11 as I understood the Revolutionary War growing up: a defining event in our nation’s history, but one they know through books, stories and the memories of parents and elders who lived through it.
Among those elders was the late Norman Mineta, who, as U.S. secretary of transportation on Sept. 11, made the difficult decision to ground all air traffic as our government responded to an unprecedented attack on American soil.
As we remember 9/11, we remember the thousands of lives lost, the bravery of first responders, the courage of those aboard the planes and inside the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the families who continue to mourn loved ones who never came home.
But remembrance also requires us to confront what followed. In the fear and uncertainty after Sept. 11, Muslim, Sikh, Arab and South Asian communities became targets of suspicion, discrimination and hate. As Japanese Americans, we understand the danger of allowing fear to determine how we see and treat our neighbors.
So, we remember.
We remember so that tragedy teaches us compassion rather than hate. We remember the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit. And we remember how, in our darkest moments, people reached for one another.
Twenty-five years later, perhaps that remains one of Sept. 11’s most enduring lessons: No matter how much the world changes, we will always need one another. We will always need community.
Lilly Simmering is executive director of the JACL. She is based in the organization’s Los Angeles office.
Link to past executive director columns here.