On the morning of September 11, 2001, I walked into my 6th-grade classroom at 9:00 AM to find our teacher glued to the television, silently watching as black smoke billowed from the World Trade Center. Instead of her usual warm welcome, Ms. DeLaVerne stoically instructed us to “take our seats.” As an 11-year-old, my thoughts were simple and naive: What kind of plane was it? Does this happen often in New York? Why is she watching TV right now?
Three minutes later — while the students continued chatting and prepared for the school day — the second tower was struck. Half of the class watched as it happened, while the other half quickly reacted to the sounds of gasps in the room, shortly followed by screams and shrieks echoing through the halls from the other classrooms as we all grappled with the same realization: This was not an accident.
A minute later, the principal announced over the intercom: “Please turn off your televisions.” What followed was the first time in my life I witnessed adults openly defying authority. Teachers shouted obscenities back at the speakers — some words I wouldn’t fully understand until middle school. They abandoned their classrooms, gathering at the confluence where several hallways met — some fuming, some weeping, all shaken. When they returned, their posture had shifted. Their day would not be spent teaching as planned; their sole job now was getting everyone home safely.
It was the first time in my life I witnessed adults openly defying authority.
A few minutes after 9:30 AM, the classroom speaker chimed requesting me at the front office. Feeling embarrassed by the public call-out, I grabbed my backpack, tossed a casual “see ya later” to my friends, and stepped into the hall.
Immediately, a blood-curdling scream stopped me cold. It was my 5th-grade teacher, Mrs. Kern, collapsing to her knees in tears. Baffled and helpless, I kept walking toward the exit. I couldn’t have known it then, but news had just reached the school that a plane hit the Western Flank of the Pentagon at 9:37 AM — the exact area where her husband worked. (I’d learn days later that he was unhurt, but in that moment, her world was tearing at the seams). When I reached my mom in the office, the air was heavy. On the drive home through the D.C. suburbs, I asked what was happening. She answered soberly: “We are under attack.”
In an instant, the open, optimistic era of the 1990s was erased. I remember it best in small moments: giving ourselves two extra hours ahead of boarding to navigate security the next time we flew, or hearing the news color-code our daily security status like a weather forecast — orange today, yellow tomorrow, no one ever quite sure what separated the two or what we were meant to do differently.
In an instant, the open, optimistic era of the 1990s was erased.
That morning had already shattered the illusion that the adult world had everything under control. In the years that followed, that initial crack in my trust of authority only widened. As an adolescent growing up near the nation’s capital, I watched the post-9/11 drumbeat of war build. Afghanistan felt like a direct response to a specific tragedy. Iraq never did. I remember watching Colin Powell hold up an ominous vial at the UN and thinking, even as a kid who couldn’t have named the discrepancy, that the math wasn’t mathing.
While many of my peers accepted, and some ultimately joined, the escalating conflicts overseas, I found myself turning to the anti-war counterculture instead. I remember one dinner table argument in particular, when a close family friend said they thought Muslim women wearing burkas in public was “frightening.” I pushed back hard, insisting it was a religious right and a protected freedom, and I didn’t let it go easily. Albums like NOFX’s War on Errorism and Green Day’s American Idiot gave shape to what I’d already started arguing for at that table: an education public school classrooms couldn’t offer, in questioning political narratives and reckoning with the human cost of foreign policy that the news often ignored.
Albums like NOFX’s War on Errorism and Green Day’s American Idiot gave shape to what I’d already started arguing for at that table: an education public school classrooms couldn’t offer, in questioning political narratives and reckoning with the human cost of foreign policy that the news often ignored.
Years later, that thread led me through a decade spent telling other people’s stories: producing videos and campaigns on social justice issues, from aging and early childhood development to climate change, public health and beyond. I watched communications work move real outcomes, like when research on adverse childhood experiences helped push Tennessee’s Republican governor to lead a “Building Strong Brains” summit, and ultimately sign legislation reforming school lunch access and discipline policy for the state’s most vulnerable kids. And other impactful campaigns reframed how people understood vaccines, not as medications with side effects to weigh, but as training for an immune system already built to fight, cutting through skepticism at the root instead of just arguing against it. That work has never let me forget how policy decisions land on actual people.
In retrospect, I can see how directly that line ran: an 11-year-old watching his teachers lose their composure over a loudspeaker, a teenager skeptical of a vial held up as “proof of WMDs” and eventually a communicator who spent a career making the human stakes of policy legible, now doing that same work on the threat that could end it all. True defense will never be found in endless escalation. It is in the slower, less cinematic work of eliminating the existential threats, like weapons of mass destruction, that put all of humanity at risk.
Looking back, September 11 didn’t just change the world. It quietly set the course for how I would choose to serve it.
