Amanda Lamb: Never forget

Do you remember how you felt the next day? The day after that? The weeks to come? Afraid, uncertain, wondering what the future would hold? Do you remember how you worried about your children and what their future might look like? Sound familiar?

I’m talking about how we all approached the world in the wake of 9/11, but those very same feelings could be used to describe how many people are feeling today in the midst of what seems like a marathon pandemic and unrest throughout the country.

I read so many moving tributes over the weekend posted by friends about their reflections on 9/11. I kept trying to post my own. But for some reason, each time I tried, I changed my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I remember that day vividly. I was covering a court case at the Wake County Courthouse. The pager (yes pager) of the police officer sitting next to me went off and said that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. The judge adjourned the court, and my photographer and I followed the court officials, police officers and lawyers into the judge’s chambers where we crowded around a small clock radio and listened solemnly to the news reports. Mind you, the user-friendly internet was still unfolding and no one had ever heard of a smartphone.

My first reaction when I left the courthouse was to call my husband and ask him to pick up our daughter from daycare. If the world was going to end, which is what it felt like at that moment, I at least wanted them to be together. My colleagues and I then embarked on a series of 15-hour days. Yes, the story was in New York—but it affected the entire country. There were so many questions—could it happen here, did you know someone in the Towers, on the planes, what should we do?

I remember doing 14 liveshots on that first day. For some reason, I recall that I wasn’t dressed to be on air because I was working on a special report. So, I had on a sweater, not a dress. But it didn’t matter. No one cared what we looked like. After each liveshot, I would return to my desk and watch the images on my television monitor in my cubicle—the impact of the planes, over and over again, and the people jumping out of the windows, over and over again. I remember my news director at the time catching me sobbing at my desk, and she told me I needed to turn the television off. That we had a job to do, and we had to put our emotions aside and focus on the task at hand.

And here my friends is where the stories converge. Journalists are human beings. The older I get, the more seasoned of a journalist I become (30 years and counting), I realize that I am still and always will be a human being with emotions, opinions and the same concerns that everyone else has. And maybe that’s why I couldn’t write a beautiful tribute on social media to 9/11, because it hits too close to home, because 19 years after a devastating tragedy that undermined our feelings of safety and confidence in our world, we are here yet again, in a similar moment of uncertainty.

Did we learn anything from 9/11? I thought we did. But maybe too much time has passed and the lessons have faded because we’ve never been more divided than we are today. There has never been more hate openly expressed in the world than there is today. How did we get through it, that terrible time in our country’s history? Do you remember? I do. We came together, that’s how. Can we do it again? I sure hope so because our future and our children’s future depends on it.

Amanda is the mom of two, a reporter for WRAL-TV and the author of several books including some on motherhood. Find her here on Mondays.