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9/11 and Drivers’ Education: An Imperfect Combination
It’s been 20 years since 9/11/01 but the repercussions are still felt today.
In the long-term scheme of how things turned out, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that day ultimately cut short the life of my father‘s’ wife. She became part of the Zadroga Act and was felled by multiple cancers that went to her brain last summer.
My September 11 experience is nowhere near as traumatic as those of people who died, or lost loved ones in the bombings. It is a curio of odds and ends, bookended by driver’s education classes.
Yes, I attended a driver’s ed class on September 11. It was the second half of a refresher course, following a two-hour session the preceding evening. Half of the 10 attendees were there, shell-shocked and attempting to tune in local news on the driving school’s TV, which did not have a cable box or antenna for over-the-air signals. The remaining five had been impacted by the attack, three stranded in New Jersey and two whose status were eerily unknown.
The instructor walked into the room and coolly snapped off the television. “It’s a horrible thing,” he announced. “But they’ll catch those fellas. Let’s get started.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, on Monday evening, September 10, 2001, most of us went to bed…
