Walking across Egypt

One Day, Now Broken in Two By: Anna Quindlen

September 11, 2001 was a tragic day in the history of the United States of America. The unthinkable happened to the “greatest” country in the world and we would never be the same, or would we? Could we recover from the horrors of that day or do we go on as if nothing ever happened? In this story by Anna Quindlen, we hear her honest views about the America we are today and how this day was broken in two. On this day in 2011, the country awoke to a day like any other. We had no way of knowing that within a matter of hours, we would witness an event so horrific that it would be remembered as, “the day America’s mind reeled, its spine stiffened, and its heart broke.” As we watched
“the plane, the flames, the plane, the fire, the falling bodies, the falling buildings,” we were in shock and felt the horror and the outrage from this event. This day, however, was also a day of rebirth and new beginnings. New life was born all around us, both literally and figuratively. Amid the chaos, babies were born and the typical
American citizen discovered something within themselves that maybe didn’t exist the day before. We all stepped up and offered what we could to help. We “looked at our lives a little harder, called our friends a little more often, hugged our kids a little tighter,” and we vowed to never forget. Did we forget? When the initial shock wore off and a few months had passed, did we forget?
Have we become so spoiled and hardened as a nation that we take such a horrific event as this and process it as just another bump in the road? “Had we become a people who confused prosperity with probity, whose culture had become personified by oversize sneakers and KFC?”
Or, did we need to push it to the back of our mind in order to go on and adopt the “Life goes on” motto as the writer suggests? This day holds a different meaning for all of us, depending upon where you were or what you were doing at the time the events unfolded. This day was definitely “Broken in two” for this country. We saw horrific events take place but we also saw a newness and awakening for the
American people. Yes, we continue our mundane tasks, celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, etc. and continue with our normal lives from September 11 because truthfully life does have to go on but we will never forget 9/11. We can’t. As the writer states, “We are people who know that we never understood what “bad day” meant until that morning that cracked our world cleanly in two, that day that made two days, September 11 and 9/11. The mundane and the monstrous.” Let us never forget the monstrous from 9/11 or the lessons learned from it but not dwell there either.
Let us also remember the good and mundane from September 11. “That is the way we have to live, or we cannot really go on living at all.”