9/11 added to an already-changing world for teens

Ten years can seem like a lifetime ago, but at the same time be as fresh in your mind as yesterday. While we remember exactly where we were and how we heard of the horrific breaking news that changed the world on Sept. 11, 2001, there were those whose experience that day was a part of their already occurring growth as young adults in a time full of changes. That’s what I first think about when reflecting back on that Tuesday morning.

Only three weeks into my freshman year of high school, I was still getting used to the hallways and daily routine that came with the new scenery of Park Hill High School. Much like this week, students were getting back into the swing of things after a highly energized football game with rival Park Hill South the previous weekend.

It would only be 16 minutes into the first class of the day when American Airlines Flight 11 would hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, beginning what would be one of the most significant days in American history. For me, and I believe most of the students and teachers, it would be over an hour until we were broken the news for the first time of the four hijacked planes and their subsequent attacks over the school’s intercom system as a part of the daily announcements that regularly took place at the end of first period each day. Although I’d eventually hear Principal Dr. Brad Kincholoe’s voice over the speakers several hundred times as a student, this time the seriousness in his tone and the message he presented on this particular morning were never quite matched again.

I was 14, still trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be, like most at that age. It was a peculiar situation to be in as a teenager. I was not familiar with situations of particular seriousness up to this point in my life, and the appropriate reaction wasn’t obvious at the time. Classroom technology 10 years ago was different than it is today. While there were televisions for presentations, few were connected to cable to receive news updates. Teachers had access to computers, but classes and lessons went on as originally planned. Most updates were spread by word of mouth, which as all former high school students know firsthand, tend to have little, if any, credibility. Within school walls all day and following a lackluster freshman football practice, for all we knew at 5 p.m. in the evening, we were leaving school and going into a world filled with uncertainty and possible chaos. Interestingly enough, which is insight into my frame of mind at the time, I spent the evening of 9/11/01 trying to counteract the images I watched being replayed over the television of the day’s events with an anxious nervousness for my first big high school football game the next day, the freshman squad’s own match-up with Park Hill South. While professional and collegiate sporting events were cancelled and delayed throughout the country, the biggest game in “our world” at the time went on as scheduled. And in a way, other young students’ reactions to 9/11 may have paralleled that to some extent. Without having a previous basis for which to compare the significant scope of that day, we grew up welded between two different periods in our country’s history and weren’t even aware of it until years later. We were maturing and our relationship with 9/11 changed as our view of the world and the events of that day gained the appropriate perspective.

Aside from those who lost loved ones in the attacks, whether on a college campus, high school hallway or middle school classroom that Sept. 11 morning, students and those similarly-aged are the ones who will live the longest to see the consequences, transformations and long-term effects. Not only because of the visible changes we’ve seen in security, national defense or foreign policy, but also of our subsequent retaliation and the wars that have followed. I’ve always had a deep admiration for those who wear the uniform, even more so when those filling the ranks began to be people I had a personal connection with.

They are my neighbor, my close friend, my fraternity president. They are the quarterback I blocked for and classmates I graduated with. They are those I only knew second hand through name and mutual association, two of which have given the ultimate sacrifice.


While they experienced 9/11 from a classroom, they are now or have been on the front lines of the battles stemming from it. Beautiful memorials are now present where such devastation occurred 10 years ago, but those who were later moved to serve, domestically or abroad, from the events of that day provide one of the truest legacies to our country in their calling to serve.