Remembrances of 9/11

Nine years ago on Sept. 11 I was running a tad late for work. I can't remember why, but I can remember what it looked like when I walked into the newsroom at The C-J like it was yesterday. Every reporter, editor and copy editor were crowded around the three televisions mounted from the ceiling in the center of the room, jaws gaping, eyes wincing as they watched black smoke pour out of the side of one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.
"A plane just flew into the World Trade Center," a coworker said in an update as I squeezed into the mix of newspeople strangely ignoring the stories they had been working on at their desks.
I saw the second plane careen into the other tower in disbelief. It wasn't an accident.
The phones weren't ringing off the hook as usual, or at least only the clerks were hearing them. The rest of us weren't about to take our eyes off the screens. It seems like we stood there for hours, but I know that can't be true because we had a paper to put out, and now we had a special edition to crank out on top of that. But I remember shouting back to editors as updates shot across the bottom of the screen about a third plane crashing into the Pentagon and yet another into a field in Pennsylvania. Our country was under attack, and while I wondered where the terrorists would strike next I was never so glad to live in Kentucky, an unlikely target. But I knew I'd never be the same, never feel as safe.
As I monitored network news stations all day it seems like I watched those planes smash into the twin towers a hundred times, and by evening the stations had voice mail recordings from husbands and wives, sons and daughters saying their last goodbyes as they waited for the inevitable inside the burning buildings. I wondered about all of those families holding out to hear from loved ones unaccounted for; the policemen, firemen and average Joes who went to their deaths trying to save people who were trapped; all those daycare children who never had a chance to grow up. In the harsh flicker of my television, I sat there alone on my couch until 2 a.m., still too scared to go to sleep but I just couldn't cry anymore.
One other remembrance from that day nine years ago: on my way home from work that night I came to a red light at the corner of Dutchmann's Lane and Breckinridge - always a busy intersection notorious for traffic congestion and fender benders - and saw something I'd never seen before that provided probably the only happy tears I produced that day. A middle-aged man stood in the median waving a huge American flag as cars whizzed by, many of them honking in support and a flood of patriotism. God bless that man because I desperately needed a lift in that moment. We all did.
In the months that followed I saw similar displays of patriotism - flags posted outside many doorsteps in any given neighborhood and a general sense of pride in what this country is about.
Today I don't see so many flags and I hear more negative sentiments about our country than positive. We're divided more than ever. Collectively, we don't look to God to restore us. And this just makes my heart sink.