9/11 is What Made Us All Want to Go Home

I cannot let the clock run out on Monday, September 11, 2023, without mentioning 9/11.

The day that changed our lives in America forever. I remember Dan Rather crying, saying America the Beautiful’s “Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears!”would never mean the same.

It was, as my mother put it, our generations’ Pearl Harbor, but smack in our center heartland.

We all know what we were doing, where we were, and how gutted we felt. We felt helpless and we grieved for loved ones and strangers alike. The skies were eerily barren for four days, shut down under Operation Yellow Ribbon: all civilian aircraft ordered to land at the nearest airport. We turned to our TV’s and sucked in the news, any news, any insight or glimpse of a reason why this had happened. We talked about it with strangers. We felt united in the way that facing a common enemy can unite us.

And we will never, ever forget.

I now have four grandchildren born three to ten years post 9-11, who will read about it in history books just as we read about World War II. We will answer their questions and try our best to present the facts. I had a child in upstate New York, a brother-in-law in Manhattan, and friends across the city. I read every victim’s obituary in the New York Times. I read about the clean-up of lower Manhattan (and heard more from friends). I will never forget the way I wanted to go home, stay home, bring my babies home, and cocoon until it was safe to come out. I told my daughter, just starting her sophomore year in college, to seek refuge with her grandparents in New York or drive to Canada. (She would later describe comforting friends whose parents and loved ones were lost in the Twin Towers.) Unlike Covid, when we were forced to stay home (to preserve our medical system in the face of extreme uncertainty), post 9-11 we wanted to stay home.

My pool contractor came by later in September. He was out of the country, stranded by the grounding of the airlines. He got back into the U.S. by boat, auto, and for a part of the way even by walking, he told me. A patriot, he told me he would have crawled to get back to US dirt and back to Texas.

Our very first post on this website was October 7, 2010, eleven months before those planes would bring down the Twin Tower icons of New York City. Eleven months before American flight 77 crashed into our Pentagon. Eleven months before United Flight 93 crashed into the netherlands of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Twenty two years after the  9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, more than 40% of the victims have not been identified. New York medical examiner officials are still working to identify unnamed victims and in fact, identified two more victims just last week. American Airlines Flight 11 was steered into floors 93 to 99 of the North Tower (1 WTC) at 8:46 a.m eastern standard time. At 9:03 a.m., hijacked United Flight 175 struck floors 77 to 85 of the South Tower (2 WTC). When the towers were struck, between 16,400 and 18,000 people were present in the WTC, a 16-acre commercial development complex of which the twin towers were the centerpieces.

As we know, people started moving out of the city, like my neighbors who officed in the Twin Towers and escaped. New York City recovered, of course, cleaned up an unfathomable mess of human remains and physical destruction, and moved on.

But today, as I read the many stories and reflections, I see a trend that started with 9/11: that brutal day in history made our homes more important and vital than ever. It also drew people away from New York City and bloomed smaller cities like Nashville, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Austin, St. Louis, even Houston. Now Covid has drawn us further out of those smaller cities:

The number of people living in non-metro areas outgrew the urban population for the first time in three decades in 2021, and the rural population expanded again last year. But growth wasn’t evenly distributed, with the top 10 counties with the largest population gains growing by an average 5%, according to Census data. That’s more than the national average of 0.4%

Bloomberg

Zero in on Texas and see that yellow dot that is Dallas — population loss of over 2,000 — surrounded by the deep blue of over 2,000 gains for miles.

It started with 9/11, after which the real estate market took off from the Great Recession of 2008, and intensified with Covid 22 years later. Today, I mourn for all those who never returned to their homes after those flights, those who went to work to continue being productive, team-building human beings, to all the firefighters and first responders who so selflessly, as they always do, rushed into a tower of burning steel to try and save lives. I mourn for their loved ones. And I mourn for what 9/11 did to our nation: we will never forget.

If you have never been to the Bush Museum near SMU, please visit the memorial to 9/11. Also, here is a timeline from the University of Virginia Miller Center that brings back the chronology of the day.