United We Stand

It started as an ordinary day. As counselor at a rural high school in Alabama I met the senior class in the cafeteria to conduct a college and career survey. The preprinted forms gathered information from students that would help identify colleges with degree programs that aligned with their career interests. We finished near the end of first block and I gathered the forms and returned to my office where my friend and colleague Donna met me at the door.

“Oh Courtney, have you heard?”

The look on her face was familiar, as together we’d dealt with concerns and tragedies like serious illness and car wrecks among our school community. I wondered if someone had died.

“They’ve hit the World Trade Center,” she said. “It’s horrible.”

I couldn’t make this register in my mind. “What? Who hit it?”

Donna filled me in on what she knew thus far. It had happened minutes earlier while I was with the students in the cafeteria. I realized our country had been attacked, and my thoughts immediately flashed to Germany where I had lived a few years earlier. I’d seen houses still pockmarked from fighting there in World War II. I could picture that happening in our neighborhoods. Just minutes earlier that had been unimaginable.

The principal met me in the hall and we went to his office to game plan how to best help our students. I had a hard time maintaining composure, those images of war-damaged buildings in the forefront of my mind. I hadn’t yet seen this attack play out on tv. I wanted to cry, but a counselor can’t help others if she can’t help herself, so I steeled myself.

We set up the TV in the Library for students to visit as they wished. Students were stunned, as we all were. I was in and out of the Library throughout the morning, going back and forth to my office to handle other things that came up.

The high school counselors throughout the district who were testing coordinators in their schools were scheduled to meet that afternoon in Central Office for our regular training for the upcoming administration of the Alabama High School Graduation Exam. I couldn’t believe we would actually have an exam in the month ahead, so sure I was that the attacks would spread throughout the country. I live in a city with heavy US Army and NASA presence, and it’s known to be an area of interest to foreign nationals who wish to do our country harm.

I was also worried about my then brother-in-law, who was in New York City on business. Throughout the morning I was in touch with my sister and other members of my family, checking on each other, encouraging ourselves to stay strong, stay safe.

I met another counselor for lunch before the scheduled testing training. I arrived at the restaurant before she did and waited in the lobby, listening overhead to the soft rock station simulcasting the local ABC television affiliate. Suddenly I heard my brother-in-law’s voice, speaking by phone to the local news director, giving eye-witness account of what was going on near his hotel, a mile or so away from the World Trade Center site. Relief that he was safe swept over me.

My friend and I fretted throughout our lunch together, wondering why we were having this training when we were needed back at school, and we just knew there would be no graduation exam, anyway. We all had bigger things to deal with.

That evening at home my husband and I closed the drapes and huddled in the darkened living room, watching CNN, following the scrawls below and above with updates to the breaking news that was filling the screens. It was hard to contain all of the information they were giving us – it seemed so foreign. Unreal.

Outside it was quiet. Neighbors were inside watching their own TVs. Skies were free of planes and helicopters as air travel was halted for two days.

I remember feeling a mixture of suspiciousness and gentle kindness when I looked at others. We were all traumatized, and overall I hoped we’d support each other. We’d just gone through a close and contentious election the year before, and I still felt a little raw from that. I remember watching the nation’s legislators standing on the steps outside the Capitol building singing God Bless America. It was a scene of beautiful harmony.

I’ll never forget this, I thought. We’ll be a changed nation now, gentler and kinder to each other. And for a little while, we were.

Now 20 years hence across our country we are at each other’s throats, so divided over politics and pandemic. We’re in the middle of an attack by a global virus, but the toxic political environment of the last several years has quashed a spirit of unity, of “we’re all in this together.” There’s little kindness and no gentleness as a whole.

Twenty years from now what will we be? When we look back on this current attack – a deadly pandemic some people deny despite evidence all around us – will we be changed? Will we unite? Will we trust each other? Will truth prevail?

That is my fervent hope.