Nows and Forevers

It’s been 31 years since the bombing of the World Trade Center on a late February afternoon in 1993. Like 9/11 eight years later, from this vantage point I find it so difficult to believe so much time has passed.

I was working about 40 miles away at a newspaper outside New York City, and heard about it on WCBS Newsradio 88 as I drove from assignment to assignment. These were the days before the cell phone, so I knew my first duty was to rush back to the newsroom to see what we needed to do. For reasons I don’t really understand, our newspaper decided to cover it mostly from wire reports and one reporter.

That didn’t make sense, given the surety there were people from our coverage area who were either working at the World Trade Center or the Financial District every day. Dozens of commuter trains piled into Grand Central station from our area every weekday, not to mention the people who drove. I was only a reporter, I didn’t drive the coverage. I just went where they told me to go.

And they didn’t want us to go.

It would be a few months later, on a big story in our city, that I would decide to follow my own instincts. But that’s another story.

The ’93 WTC attacks get lost in history, I’m afraid, because of the sheer scope of 9/11 and how many people it killed and how the aftereffects still reverberate today. I know it does for me, as I lived closer and worked closer and actually covered 9/11 and its aftermath in 2001 and in the years afterward for several papers. Sept. 11 wasn’t just the biggest story I would ever cover, it was also personal. Like most everyone in the New York area, we had a personal connection.

It’s still personal. It’s not performative saying #neverforget. Because we never will.

Remember what happened 31 years ago today, that’s important too. It was one of the first times I remember thinking that terrorism was more than just something that happened overseas. I knew that for years, for a girl my age from my hometown was killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988. But I guess I was too naive to think it couldn’t happen here. Then the ’93 bombings, which killed six people. Two years later, the domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City.

And then Sept. 11.

I moved to another state about a decade after 9/11, but it’s remained in my heart and my head. I listen to the reading of the names every year until one in particular, and I never miss it, no matter what. It’s crucial we remember them. And it’s crucial we remember those we lost, 31 years ago today.

We must never forget.