I’ll never forget the day.
It was my second week as a freshman at McMinnville High School. During the summer I’d use the television in my room as an alarm. On Sept. 11, 2001, at 6:30 a.m., it turned on.
It was tuned to NBC and you can imagine what I was watching when I woke up that morning. I, along with the rest of the world, witnessed the biggest attack on American soil in 60 years.
Over time, it was revealed that Osama bin Laden, who was then most known for his 1993 World Trade Center car bomb and 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa, was behind the attacks.
I watched as the United States declared war on the Taliban-controlled government in Afghanistan for harboring bin Laden. Two years later, then-President George W. Bush declared war on Iraq in order to displace Saddam Hussein and disarm the country he claimed held “weapons of mass destruction.”
Then, nine years and 233 days after the Twin Towers fell, I sat at my computer when a Twitter update popped up on my browser. “BREAKING: Obama to issue unusual Sunday evening statement in 30 minutes,” read the Huffington Post’s latest tweet.
At approximately 8:30 p.m. Pacific time, President Obama addressed the nation. Less than one week earlier, the president produced his long-form birth certificate to appease those who claimed he was born outside this country.
After the conference, I began to receive messages, tweets, emails and Facebook updates.
“You hear about that bin Laden stuff?” read one text. “Dude, Obama’s getting re-elected.”
We asked for your stories on our Facebook page. Where were you when Obama made the announcement?
“Talking on fb. All the posts started popping up!” wrote Kelli Lindsay.
“I was at home studying for a math test … all of a sudden my husband came running towards me saying Osama had been killed,” Marina Gross wrote.
Andrew McClellan was the one person who responded on Twitter.
“Honest truth, I was just logging into StarCraft 2 when the news arrived. Chat channels were abuzz with the news. Good riddance!” he wrote.
Plenty of late-night hosts joked about how the president’s announcement cut into The Celebrity Apprentice, a show produced, created and hosted by the man who cried for weeks for Obama to produce his birth certificate.
Jon Stewart at “The Daily Show” speculated that there were only two things for which Obama could possibly interrupt the NBC show. Obama might take over the program to berate Trump a bit more as he did during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“The more likely scenario, as Hollywood has taught us, is when a black president interrupts your show, is that a meteor is heading toward Earth,” Stewart said in reference to Morgan Freeman addressing the United States as its president in “Deep Impact.”
The news dominated the front page of every major newspaper the following morning and produced follow-up after follow-up. The New York Times ran a special section on Tuesday that dealt exclusively with bin Laden’s death.
The reactions in New York were understandable.
“I’m glad he died before me,” said a ground zero worker who’s now tethered to a respirator after inhaling the toxic fumes produced by the fires on site on Sept. 11.
And now, less than a week since the announcement of the death of America’s, nay, the world’s most-wanted man, there’s a lot left in the air.
Did the Pakistani government know about bin Laden’s whereabouts? Where are the other 10 surviving extremists who helped plot the 9/11 attacks? When will our troops come home from Afghanistan?
The answers to these questions may take awhile, but one thing’s for sure right now: just as the sound of my television turning on and displaying a smoking World Trade Center building will forever be crystal clear in my mind, so will the Twitter update that invaded the lower right-hand corner of my Firefox browser ten years later.
Editor Eder Campuzano can be reached at 541-463-5655 or torcheditor@lanecc.edu.
