5th ANNIVERSARY (Part One)

"Where were you when..."

People have been using this conversation starter for generations. It's a way of experiencing our shared history-marking/sociological-events. Each generation has a least a few worthwhile entries with the most famous of all, the day JFK was assassinated, attributed to the previous generation. Maybe Peal Harbor or V-J day for the generation before that (although I've not once had the thrill of hearing a first person account of either event from someone I knew).

In my own 35 years I've had a few of these moments and as time moves forward my memory combined with newer events push old events downward in importance. Sometimes pushing them right off the chart. But some events, even really old ones, can get sealed in your mind if for no other reason then the uniqueness of the information or maybe even more importantly for the way in which the information comes to you.

I don't remember John Lennon's death in 1980, but I do remember President Reagan being shot in 1981 because I had just arrived at my friends house to watch TV and they told me the news. I was only 10, Jon and Jason Hitt were only 8, and 7 respectively. I remember walking up the front yard only to see them come bounding out of the house and Jason, with only slight dramatics, telling me that while they were watching Tom&Jerry cartoons the screed was interrupted by a diagonal series of scrolling text which read "The President Has Been Shot... The President Has Been Shot...". A delay tactics while the news anchors got prepped to go on the air. Before that happened my friends had simply switched off the set.

At a later date I would be fascinated with the details of the event: watching the video clip over and over; reading books and article about every tiny moment; learning how the White House had a mini-coup (moronic Haig going live on TV telling people he was in charge); how the stock market was closed (at the time I learned this I was awed by the idea that just shooting this one person could shake our financial foundation); how Jodie Foster was involved; how Carter had previously been Hinkley's target; how the Secret Service agent that pushed Reagan into the car, falling on top of him in the process, had originally thought that when Reagan coughed up blood it was a result of a broken rib from the leap into the car (only discovering at the hospital that he was actually shot). All these things are in my memory now, but my only true "live" memory of the event was just one small snippet in time. I have no further memory of what happened next, or later that evening, or the next day - it was just Jason Hitt's somewhat bemused and slightly excited exclamations that are forever embedded in my brain.

It's not surprising that I would later become a news junkie. I spent years as a paperboy, long before 24-hour news networks or the instantaneous world of the internet, taking joy in always reading the front page before anyone else. Sometimes even delaying my delivery as I took my own sweet time. The peak of this was during the Iran-Contra scandal which I didn't fully understand except as my first experience with government overtly lying to the people. I took solace and pleasure in the satire of Berkely Breathed's "Bloom County" comic which lampooned the Reagan administration, and the current events both subtly and not so subtly. I was both young enough and old enough to enjoy and understand the quarks of our system through the comics page.

I remember in my late twenties I started asking people of a similar age what some of their key moments of national or world events might be - fully expecting them to overlap with my own. For many people my age (35) we remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of the first Gulf War. Certainly I had been following the events leading up the war, but at that moment I hadn't been paying super close attention to the news as I was preparing for a new semester of college. I was organizing all my new text books when the DJ of a radio station, not usually one for providing any news, broke into a song and very somberly informed his listeners that the United States had just started bombing Iraq. It caught me by surprise, a key element for these defining moments, and shocked me out of my self-absorbed moment and thrust my mind on to the world stage. I remember running downstairs to tell my father, sitting on the couch reading the paper, and being confused by his nonchalance. I ran back up to my TV, turned on CNN in time to see the video-game-like footage of our bombs falling on Baghdad ad their anti-aircraft missiles lit up the sky giving us a murky-green image on our screen. That was a pretty big moment, but it wasn't a singular event - just the start of an event that lasted 100 days.

The first time for me, the first time a news event shook me and captured my full attention, was Wednesday, January 28th, 1986. I was 14 and sitting at the top of the Shawnee High School gymnasium bleachers killing the time in between my mid-term exams. Another student sitting next to me asked if I had heard about the teacher who exploded in space. He seemed serious, but I didn't have any idea what he was talking about and thought he was setting up some sort of lame joke. I'm not sure if there was a school announcement - some of the students were in the middle of tests and they probably wouldn't want to distract them with such news. I had a half day and was able to leave at lunch time.

At home I turned on my TV and was floored by the repeated looping video footage, every 73 seconds, of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding; watching the booster engines spiraling off in opposite directions; seeing the confused or horrified looks on the faces of the crowd at Cape Canaveral. I remember feeling very upset and crying a little. I knew, even then, that I wasn't crying just for the seven dead astronauts (including school teacher Christa McCauliffe, the would-be first civilian in space, part of a school tie-in program I knew nothing about. In just 5 short years the shuttle program had somehow become commonplace) but for national pride, and even more than that, as hokey as it may sound, for my first sense of humanity and it's frailties. I was acutely upset that humanity, as expressed in our efforts of technological feats and desires to explore, explore, explore, had suffered a serious and humanising setback. We were humbled. I remember running to the door as my mother came home from work, the first person I would get to share the experience with. I remember later learning that some TV viewers had complained that their soap operas had been interrupted by the constant news coverage and I remember feeling outraged at this insensitivity. I remember snippets of Reagan's speech, a sincere and heartfelt tribute to the astronauts and to man's need to explore - an oratory skill yet unmatched by any of his successors and at least the three previous predecessors. I remember saving all the newspapers. I was still a delivery boy then and I became obsessed in learning every detail, every day, of every story, covering every angle. When I learned that the Courier-Post had printed a morning edition with a different front page I called my boss and begged him to get me a copy, which he did, and which I carefully sealed up in a plastic bad along with copies of other papers I was saving which then went into our attic and which, a decade later, got accidentally thrown away.

So the first was the Challenger in 1986.

These events effect or don't effect each of us differently depending on a short list of factors not the least of which is your maturity, your frame of mind, at the time of the event. Another is the way in which you learn about the event. And of course the proximity to you personally. The assassination of Anwar Sadat is in my peripheral, but is probably quite vivid to a 35 y/0 Egyptian. The Space Shuttle Columbia was saddening for me, but not at all like the emotional effects of the Challenger - although maybe so for a younger person, especially one with an interest in science and technology.

So the game of "Where were you..." (not really a game, I know) is entirely subjective. We like to play it because we learn about individual stories of a shared experience - something we can all talk about from our own point of view. We like to play it because we can define our personal, national, and sometimes international timelines to these events.

V-J Day signaled to the world the end of a long and deadly war and also signaled the beginnings of a hopeful new world order.

JFK signaled the opposite on a national level. The end of Camelot and the beginning of a period of social tumult that would bring, among other tragedies, two more "Where were you..." assassinations (RFK & MLK)

The Challenger, on a personal level, galvanized something in me that combined elements of national pride and loss, my first sense of humanity at large, and the media machine that burned it all into my mind. And that was just newspapers and the 6 o'clock news.

15 years later (not quite a full generation) an event would happen, brought to us live, in Real Time and in media epic proportions that would pique the personal, national, and international community in such an indelible way that it damn near re-defines the "Where were you..." game in the sense that more people than ever before could share in the unfolding horror. High speed internet users could get live video feeds, even dial-up users could get up to the minute information and constantly re-freshed images. News stations had a dozen live helicopter video cameras to choose from. Hundreds if not thousands of amateur and professional video/photographers could transmit their imagery via the internet to the big media for near instantaneous mass audience consumption. Cellphone networks, combined with landlines, allowed us to reach out and communicate with each other in mass quantities (and in the future camera cellphones would make images of the London subway bombing event even more instantaneous). In fact, for this singular event, cellphones users played a critical role in actually shaping the event as it unfolded - actually altering the events in ways contrary to the forces that had created the events. In real time. Live on TV. A result of the combination of the speed of modern reporting mated with cellphone technology - a scourge to some, but on this day a hero-making combination.

For me it started with a simple land line phone call from a friend in New York. I was in California, 3 times zones away, sleeping peacefully in my large rented 3-bedroom townhouse situated amongst the palm trees in the best part of my favorite neighborhood. I was, for all purposes, alone. One roommate on the road, the other in a drug-induced sleep (a friend from whom I had become increasingly alienated to the point I forgot he was even home at the time).

At about 7:30 PST my phone woke me up.

Me: "Hello?"

Andrew Haver: "Brett, it's Andrew Haver. Are you awake?"

"No."

"New York is being attacked! The Twin Towers are blowing up! The Pentagon has been bombed..."

"Eh? Wha..?"

"Brett... They're evacuating the White House!"

For some reason the first couple things seemed silly. Like he was joking or confused. But strangely it was the line about the White House that really got my attention. Something about that didn't seem funny. It didn't seem made up. Like... it didn't seem the kind of thing you could be confused about.

That was how the morning of September 11th, 2001, began for me.