In the office before class, the secretary was listening to the radio, and heard that a small plane had hit the tower. Then, the principal stuck her head in during class to tell us that it was a terrorist attack and al'Quaeda was claiming responsibility. After class, I was waiting to take the bus home, and waited for more than an hour, before going into the library to see if they had bus schedules. It didn't occur to me to make the connection, because that particular bus route started in the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan, took the Lincoln Tunnel and then progressed through North Jersey. Because I am a sane and functioning adult who tries not to make my problems anyone else's, I didn't think that should make a difference, and if going into and out of NY was not viable, they could at least have stared the buses in the civilized part of the route so the 99% of the route that was not even in the same state could still use the mass transit on which they relied. I had not yet become attuned to the bureaucratic/political mentality, not to mention how utterly fucking stupid anyone in any position of authority anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard is, so I assumed that the people responsible for literally keeping the trains running would try to adapt and overcome this sort of difficulty. I had no idea what a display of utter pussiness would grip the state in the week, and even months and years to come.
So in the library, when I asked about a bus schedule, the middle aged women muttering in a knot behind the desk went all wide-eyed and one of them asked me in a tremulous voice "Are you trying to get into the city? Have you heard...?" My first impulse was to hoist my backpack and say "The imam said it was VERY important to the brotherhood that I get this to Port Authority today," but I read the room. We didn't have the term 'Karen' back then, but that's what I was talking to. So I walked home.
By that evening, the establishment was already swinging into action for the highest priority on everyone's mind, of course....making sure that American Muslims did not suffer dirty looks or anything like much more useful ethnic groups experienced, say during World War Two, when the Greatest Generation lost their shit over Japan having the temerity to attack a hostile country's military facilities. To the point that my then 18 year old, much less politically aware & more naive brother told me "I saw the chief's car at (the local convenience store). He must be protecting Wally & George." Yeah...no. Walid etc was in no danger. The chief and the other old timers would congregate at the end of the day to sit on milk crates and chat over coffee. But that's what everyone was being told was the REAL danger, already. Wally's nephews Amir & Ibrahim run the place now. Ibrahim has more second amendment/molon labe tee-shirts then even the local rednecks. I'd ship the entire population of Portland to Palestine in trade for another dozen of them. If Antifa & BLM come to town, they'll be protecting the Korean dry cleaner next door.

Those were our choices in those days. Self-flagellation for the imagined sins of the country, of panicked rush to punish anyone we could hit to make ourselves feel macho, while denouncing anyone who did not want to send troops to war as cowards. And a bipartisan auctioning of our birthright of essential liberties for a pottage of 'security'.

It was consequential because we made it so. We could have rolled with it, and treated it like we would the deaths from an accident, or an ordinary homicide, instead of treating it like a much more significant thing, which, incidentally, is just what the terrorists wanted. Of course, nowadays, the unfortunately-not-African population has taken overreacting to a whole new level...