In Memory of 9/11: Looking Back 20 Years Later

By: Carolyn Deal 

People who had secondhand experiences of 9/11 recall their memories and emotions of the event.

On September 11, 2001, 19 people involved with al Qaeda, an Islamic extremist group, hijacked four airplanes. Two of the planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the third plane was found at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the final plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

September 11 attacks | History, Summary, Timeline, Casualties, & Facts | Britannica

The impact from this attack extended outside the boundaries of New York City. The hijacked planes took off from Logan Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts, furthering the spread of information to local news stations. Reporters notified the public online about the attack and it was only a matter of time before the mood in the workplace changed.

“I remember a co-worker, Margaret McCauley, looking at her computer as she sat at her desk, saying to the office ‘A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.’ My immediate thought was that she had to be mistaken, and I remember looking out the office window. Not that I could see New York from there, but for some reason I felt the need to look outside… I remember having a visceral need to go home and be with my family, just be in their presence; which I did,” who worked at MassDOT, Pamela Deal said.

While Deal was able to go home to be with her family, others were not.

“On 9/11, my wife and I were returning in our car from a vacation home west of Boston to Boston after enjoying some days of rest and relaxation. Our daughter called to inform us of a terrible accident that just happened… Our first thought was ‘Oh those poor people and their families, what awful tragedy,’ retired Boston police officer, Robert Dapkas said.

When Deal and Dapkas look back at 9/11 20 years later, their memories shape their perspectives today.

“History gets muted over time, or sometimes erased all together, but we need to remember if we are to not repeat,” Deal said.

The event makes people start to question others’ motives and their own feelings of security within the world.

“9/11 is still present in the minds of many people. Certainly anyone who flies. If you fly, do you still look at your fellow passenger the same way?... We cannot be completely free and completely safe!” Dapkas said.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Young Voters Voting More and Left, not Less and Less

Image
  Gideon Daley     As young Americans enter the voting populations they are both leaning more progressive and voting more often, studies show.      New studies are finding that young people in America today are increasingly more likely to vote than before.  Youth turnout has been a problem for many candidates, such as Bernie Sanders, who ran on the left wing of the Democrat Party as the candidate during the 2020 Democrat Primaries and who had a large portion of youth supporters.      A new study, however, from the Tufts University Center for Information and Research on Learning and Civic Engagement found that 50 to 52% voted in the 2020 presidential election, a, which is an increase compared to the 42 to 44% of young Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election. The CIRCLE study says that this increase in youth voting was key to President Biden’s victory, as young people in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania...
Read more

The Best Color for College Student's Rooms

By Emma Cianciulli             Students living in dorm rooms are more likely to study if their rooms are blue themed, according to a study. The U.S. National Institutes of Health conducted a study in 2018 about how the interior color of college and university residence halls affects the students living in them.  “We exploited a unique architectural setting composed by six buildings that differed only for the interior color, investigating pleasantness for each specific color; how this pleasantness related to general chromatic preference, the effects of the interior color on lightness level and lightness satisfaction, and the effect of the color on the residents’ functioning and mood,” the study said.  The six colors were blue, red, orange, violet, green, and yellow. There were 443 students who had to live in these buildings for an average of just over 13 months, and then results were collected and analyzed.  “The blue interior color was c...
Read more

Online School May Jeopardize Student's Futures, According to Study.

Image
By Erich Meslin Online learning may be putting college student’s education in jeopardy, according to studies by West Point and Marshall University.           The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many colleges and universities to change the classroom dynamic by making online learning the new normal.           More than 700 universities and colleges have adopted the online platform ‘zoom’ to allow their students to learn without fears of spreading Covid-19.           According to a study conducted by West Point, 551 freshman students learning online were observed to have lower grades in comparison to classes taught in person.           The study concluded that final grades for online students dropped by 0.215 standard deviations: a result apparent in both assignments and exams, according to the study. ...
Read more