Let us pause to remember

With all the hoopla over politics and thinking about the war, it so often gets lost what happened on that day in September five years ago. I can still remember the awful sense of disbelief when I first heard the news that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center. I was teaching in middle school and it was my planning period and I was on the phone with a mother of a student to talk about the student's work in my class and she was crying as she told me. Then, while we were talking, the second plane hit and we knew that it couldn't have been an accident. The other three teachers on my team rushed to watch the TV and then had to face the question of what to say to students as they came in for the next period. Should we inform them of what had happened and should we let them watch TV? We did. Not much will get a crowd of 8th graders to sit silently for several hours, but they did on that day.

It feels almost good to remember that anger and that grief. We need to recover those feelings we felt as we saw people searching bulletin boards for notices of their relatives. I remember that terrible sense that we would never find the people responsible and that this was the new world we were living in. Who would have thought then that we wouldn't face another such terrorist incident on our soil five years later?

Let us pause to remember the grief and the anger. Let us never forget.