Ten years ago today

I was working at the Target store in Baxter. On Monday, September 10, 2001, I felt a need to play hooky from work for a day, and made arrangements for a couple of coworkers to cover for me the next day because I was going to call in “sick.”

I got up on the morning of 9/11, called in, and then sat down at my computer to kill some time. I had talked to my cousin, who had decided that he was going to cut out of his job early, and then we would drive to St. Cloud to spend the day.

I turned the TV on, and tuned in to a station that never has news, or newsbreaks, so I was unaware of the events unfolding just yet. I was content to sit and surf the Internet, all the while watching reruns of M*A*S*H.

When I first activated the computer, the news page that came up first on my screen had a headline about terrorist activity at the World Trade Center. I didn’t pay much attention to it; I thought it was a reference to the WTC bombings from several years earlier.

I sat and surfed the Net, blissfully unaware of what was happening in New York City, until my cousin called and asked if I saw what was going on. I immediately turned the channel to a one of the three major networks, I forget which, and that’s when I saw the devastation.

I sat in silence as the events were played and replayed on my TV screen. I disconnected from the Internet, and called my cousin. We talked about it for a few minutes, and decided that the best immediate thing we could do was leave town as planned, to get away from the whole thing.

We drove to St. Cloud, listening to the radio the entire trip, completely unbelieving what we were hearing. We didn’t do much else that day; in fact, we ended up turning around and returning home not long after reaching St. Cloud.

I guess what I remember the most is the almost surreal feelings that swept over everybody in the weeks afterward. Conspiracy theories; desires to whack out Bin Laden, weird dollar bill tricks, and the abundant Internet hoaxes that sprang up immediately. I’m not going to go into any detail about all of that; I’m sure everybody remembers all of it as well as I do.

What really troubles me about those days, aside from the horrendous loss of life, are some of the other things that happened as a result of the attacks. I was working in retail at the time, and new directives concerning store merchandise began flying in to us from the higher-ups.

Anything in the store that had a picture depicting the World Trade Center was pulled from the shelves. Books, video games, and anything else with a possible terrorism subject were yanked. It’s almost as if everybody thought that it was possible to erase the entire incident from existence. To my way of thinking, this was not the way to go about recovering from this particular tragedy. You can’t erase what happened, or pretend that it never happened; all you can do is go on with your lives in the best way you know how.

That’s essentially the message for today. Remember. Honor those who were lost, not only at Ground Zero, but also the heroes of Flight 93, who gave their lives to protect others from further damage, and also those whose lives were lost at the Pentagon.

We need to do whatever we can to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.