Someday We’ll All Be Free

Five years ago I was working as driving instructor. Yeah I have plenty of material from that short experience to write a book, but that’s something for another time. Since school was in session in September, I didn’t start until the schools let out around three o’clock. So like many in their early twenties with nothing to get up fore in the morning, I routinely slept in back then. But on this day five years ago, I was awoken by my roommate who knocked on my bedroom door and told me to turn on the TV. When someone tells you to do as much, you know something is up because if it wasn’t important, someone would have to sell you on it like “turn on Sportcenter, they have the top ten goalie fights in NHL history.”

When I turned on my television, it was already tuned to NBC so it was The Today Show where I saw a picture of on of the Twin Towers with a pillar of smoke coming out of it. Katie Couric and her colleagues were taking about how this was possibly an accident, but I knew better, pilots just don’t accidentally fly into buildings and I doubted that they were even aloud to fly above New York City for that very reason just in case something went wrong. But Couric built her career on optimism, so it’s only fitting that an accident would be the best case scenario. Then just minutes after turning on my television, all doubt were put to rest as we could see live on our sets that a second plane flew into the other Twin Tower.

For the next five hours I sat in front of my television even though there was very little to report aside from another plane going into the Pentagon and a fourth plane that went down in the middle of Pennsylvania that may or may not have been connected. Of course we know now that it was and I even drove out to Shanksville on the first anniversary to see the memorial which was just a makeshift one. For those five hours I remember flipping through the channels of my television just to see how other channels reported the news. Most cable channels switched over to the broadcast station of their parent company such as MTV and VH1 were airing CBS News, USA and Bravo were showing NBC’s coverage, and so on while other channels just went blank. Even though I had no family or friends who

When if was finally time to go to work, I switched over to a radio station, which also simulated its sister station’s new coverage. When I picked up my first student up from school, we called her mother and I gave them two options, I could drive her home or we could go ahead with her scheduled block of driving. She, as well as my other students I had scheduled for that day, choose to go on with their appointment even the one who had an uncle who worked at the Pentagon. I usually don’t let student to listen to the radio as they drive, but I made an exception that day, and the next couple days so we both would be caught up to date.

If there was something good that came out of the days after September 11th was there was it brought the country together for the first time that I could remember. I was a little too young to remember the Miracle on Ice and of course World War II was well before my time. There was even a sense that the materialism of the vapid late nineties and would give way for people to live more meaningful lives. Of course that hasn’t happen as in the last five years Paris Hilton has somehow been able to release a book and album as well as star in a television show and a movie (well two, one of which you can purchase at Best Buy and one you can’t) and somehow her arrest was the biggest story of last week. Even the togetherness we felt as a nation didn’t last long as way too many people make too much money on this nation being divided and just three years afterwards we had the most bitter presidential election ever that is still being argued about two years after the fact making us more fractured then even before that day. And finally after five years, the powers that be just unveiled the plans for what the new World Trade Center plaza will look like, although maybe that would have gotten more press had they not made it public the same week Paris Hilton got her DUI.


For longtime reader, most of you know that the title of my posts comes from lines of songs or movies (or at least I hope you have figured that out by now). But as easy as this post flowed out of me, it took me a while to come up with a fitting title. But while typing this up, I put on the America: A Tribute to Heroes album. If you remember the Friday after, most every network simulcast a telethon to raise money for the victims then rushed out the CD with royalties also going to the fund. On the broadcast Alicia Keys performed a Donny Hathaway song; Someday We’ll All Be Free. Even though the previous paragraph decried how we as a culture have gotten worse opposed to better, I think there is hope that someday we’ll all be free.