By Shaina Cole | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
I was on my knees scrubbing stains out of the carpet as I watched it all unfold.
This was the fall of 2001. I was 21, three months out of college, working temp jobs while I looked for something permanent. My fiancé and I had been in our rental for a short time. The people before us had left stains ground into the carpet, and I was still working on getting them up.
My usual routine was to eat something, then clean. Just an ordinary Tuesday, and I was in the South, nowhere near New York.
I turned the TV on. Breaking news was already running when I sat down.
A plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. I picked up the phone and called my mom. I asked her if she was seeing what I was seeing. I don’t remember what she said back. I’ve tried. Twenty-five years have worn that part out of my memory. What I do remember is the disbelief, and that I couldn’t look away.
I scrubbed and I watched. My hands kept moving over that carpet while the worst day most of us would ever see unfolded on a screen a few feet away.
I don’t remember the exact second I understood how big it was. Maybe when the first tower came down. Somewhere in there the thought arrived that this is probably the biggest tragedy I will see in my lifetime. So many lives, gone just like that.
I didn’t know anyone there. Not in the towers, not at the Pentagon, not on any of the planes. My connection to that day was the same as most Americans, through a television, from far away, feeling something enormous about people I would never meet.
And here is the part I still hold onto, all these years later. It isn’t the tragedy. It’s what came after.
I watched people run toward the smoke instead of away from it. I watched a country empty its pockets. The flags went up. Those yellow ribbons on trees and cars, too. Blood drives. Donation drives.
And people getting in their cars and driving to New York from every corner of the country, not just firefighters and rescue crews, but private citizens who had no reason to go except that they were needed. Strangers digging through what was left, looking for anyone they could still pull out, feeding the workers, caring for the ones who made it out alive.
Nobody was checking party registration. Nobody asked what church you went to before they handed someone a bottle of water. For a while, too short a while, the labels came off. We were just Americans, and Americans were helping Americans.
I had never been more proud to be one. Not because of what happened. Because of who we were after it happened.
That day reminded me there were still so many good people in this country, and that when it counts, the things we let divide us turn out to be smaller than we tell ourselves they are.
I grieve the loss. I always will. Thousands of people never came home. Thousands more are still paying, first responders and survivors carrying the physical, mental and emotional scars a quarter-century later. That is the weight this anniversary should carry.
But grief isn’t the only thing I feel when I look back. I also feel a kind of longing. I miss that version of us. I want it back without the horror that summoned it.
Some of you reading this lived through that day and remember exactly where you stood. Some of you were too young to remember it, or you weren’t born yet.
Either way, I want you to understand more than just what happened.
Thousands of people were killed that day, and many thousands more are still living with it, physically and otherwise. But the facts of that morning aren’t the only thing I’d want to pass on to you.
We are all different. Different colors, different religions, different upbringings, different lives. It’s rare to find a single person who thinks like you on everything you can name. That’s not a flaw in the country. That’s the country.
What we learned on September 11 and in the days after is that our differences don’t have to decide how we treat each other. We shouldn’t need another catastrophe to remember it. We shouldn’t wait for the next terrible morning to be reminded that the person next to us is a person.
So this is the thing I’ve come to believe, slowly, in the years since I scrubbed that carpet.
Instead of reaching for a reason to criticize someone, try reaching for the thing you can agree on. It’s almost always there if you look for it.
It shouldn’t take a tragedy to bring us together.
I hope we don’t wait for one.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.