Speaker 1: Good morning, peeps, and welcome to willk F Daily with
Speaker 1: Meet Your Girl Danielle Moody, recording live from our pod
Speaker 1: stream studios in Times Square. Folks, over the weekend we
Speaker 1: recognize the twentieth anniversary of nine to eleven, and over
Speaker 1: the weekend and I'm sure for the rest of the
Speaker 1: month we will see segments, read articles, videos, documentaries on
Speaker 1: nine to eleven where we were and what has happened.
Speaker 1: And I want to take today's episode to have my
Speaker 1: own remembrance, which I'm sure we'll conjure memories of your own,
Speaker 1: and to think about how much our world was transformed
Speaker 1: over the last twenty years, all of the things that
Speaker 1: have happened that prior to September eleventh, two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: we would have never thought could happen in this country.
Speaker 1: We believed prior to nine to eleven that our borders
Speaker 1: right at our oceans separated us from quote unquote the
Speaker 1: bad people. That it wasn't you know for decades, Pearl
Speaker 1: Harbor being one of the only major attacks that we
Speaker 1: had ever seen in America throughout my entire lifetime, war
Speaker 1: or acts of war and acts of terror and violence
Speaker 1: were something that happened someplace else. They didn't happen in
Speaker 1: the United States. And even though we had our Timothy
Speaker 1: mcvays and would have our bombs in nineteen ninety six
Speaker 1: in Atlanta at the Olympics, those were kind of few
Speaker 1: and far between. To think about this nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: twenty eighth year anniversary, on the backdrop of just having
Speaker 1: withdrawal from Afghanistan, to think about the thirteen troops military
Speaker 1: personnel that were killed at Kabul at the airport, the
Speaker 1: oldest being twenty three. They were toddlers, and some of
Speaker 1: them weren't even born when nine to eleven happened, and
Speaker 1: yet they were sent to defend a war that we've
Speaker 1: been fighting for twenty years. I think about what life
Speaker 1: was like before, and twenty years is a long time
Speaker 1: to kind of remember when we felt safer, when we
Speaker 1: weren't surveiled, where we watched shows and movies that featured terrorists,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't anything that we ever experienced in our
Speaker 1: own day to day lives. So I want to bring
Speaker 1: you back to where I was on September eleventh, two
Speaker 1: thousand and one, and things that I remember bubbling through
Speaker 1: my mind and kind of excitement that I had for
Speaker 1: the future, and then all of that excitement turning into fear.
Speaker 1: So September eleventh, two thousand and one, a couple of
Speaker 1: months prior, I had just graduated from college and was
Speaker 1: so excited. My whole life was in front of me.
Speaker 1: What would I do? Where would I go? Well, first off,
Speaker 1: I was going to be setting off on a flight
Speaker 1: to Europe for the next three months to travel around
Speaker 1: the world. That was my gift that my parents had
Speaker 1: given me for graduation to do so with my best friend,
Speaker 1: and our flight was to take off on September thirteenth.
Speaker 1: That morning, I was in Washington, DC. And just so
Speaker 1: folks have context, because I made a joke about this
Speaker 1: earlier that I was at my boyfriend's house, So that
Speaker 1: just goes to show you how much has changed in
Speaker 1: twenty years. And in Arlington, Virginia, I started to receive
Speaker 1: phone calls on what was probably a flip phone at
Speaker 1: that time. It was early in the morning, and I
Speaker 1: was no longer in college, and I was getting ready
Speaker 1: to leave in but a couple of days to travel
Speaker 1: for the next three months. So I was sleeping and
Speaker 1: the phone kept ringing, kept ringing, and so finally I
Speaker 1: answered it, and on the other line was my boyfriend
Speaker 1: at the time, and he said, Danielle, where are you?
Speaker 1: And I was like, I'm in the apartment in Arlington.
Speaker 1: And it was like, do you know anybody that works
Speaker 1: in the world Trade Towers? And I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: what an odd question to be asking. No, I don't
Speaker 1: think so, but both of my parents are working in
Speaker 1: the city. Why what's happening? Turn on the TV? Was
Speaker 1: the response. So I sit up and I turn on
Speaker 1: the television and on every station is smoke billowing out
Speaker 1: of the first tower that was hit. I could not,
Speaker 1: like the rest of the world, believe my eyes. This
Speaker 1: is one of the most, if not the most iconic
Speaker 1: skylines in the world, and all I could think of
Speaker 1: in that moment, because this day, like many traumatic days
Speaker 1: that would soon follow, are kind of I don't know,
Speaker 1: etched into my mind. I looked into the towers and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking to myself, are people there are people inside?
Speaker 1: What's happening? And then right in front of us, the
Speaker 1: second plane hit. And then my reaction was, oh, my god,
Speaker 1: are there people on that plane? Because the initial thought
Speaker 1: when we first saw the smoke was that there had
Speaker 1: been an accident, right, because planes and helicopters fly around
Speaker 1: New York City all the time. There are two of
Speaker 1: major international airports, right, and so it had to have
Speaker 1: been an accident, because it never would have occurred to
Speaker 1: any of us prior to that time that this was intentional,
Speaker 1: that it would be that nineteen hijackers fit with armor
Speaker 1: and zip ties would have the ability to hijack an
Speaker 1: entire fucking plane and crash it into the towers. Well,
Speaker 1: my eyes didn't leave the television screen except when there
Speaker 1: was news that there was another plane that had hit.
Speaker 1: But this time it wasn't in New York that it
Speaker 1: was around the corner from where I was at the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: from the apartment building that I was living in at
Speaker 1: the time. On the balcony, you could see the smoke
Speaker 1: billowing up from the Pentagon, which was probably about a
Speaker 1: mile two miles away from where I was standing. It
Speaker 1: was if in that moment, the entire place, all of Arlington,
Speaker 1: all of New York, just seemed to stop dead in
Speaker 1: its tracks. I turned back, went back inside, and feverishly
Speaker 1: began to call my parents, who, like I said, both
Speaker 1: were working in the city in Manhattan, at that time,
Speaker 1: and if folks remember, if you were trying to reach
Speaker 1: people in New York, all you got were busy signals.
Speaker 1: There was call waiting, was not breaking through, so you
Speaker 1: just kept having to call and call and call. So
Speaker 1: for an hour or so, which felt like forever at
Speaker 1: that time, I couldn't get in contact with either of
Speaker 1: my parents. Finally I did, and I had called around
Speaker 1: to my grandparents, to my aunts, to my uncles to
Speaker 1: see if they had heard anything from them. Thankfully, my
Speaker 1: parents were okay. Thankfully my mother had gotten news while
Speaker 1: she was commune to the city about what had just
Speaker 1: transpired and was able to get on a train and
Speaker 1: head right back home. The same went for my dad.
Speaker 1: The fear that was coming from their voices and from
Speaker 1: my own was palpable. As we were on the phone,
Speaker 1: asking each other what was happening. And remember I just
Speaker 1: had graduated from college. I'm thinking that the world is
Speaker 1: my oyster, that I'm getting ready to step out into
Speaker 1: this brave new space with all of this information and knowledge,
Speaker 1: ready to embark on my great adventure. It's now, in
Speaker 1: hindsight that I realized that my entire life has been
Speaker 1: from that moment on the kind of pathway into adulthood
Speaker 1: has just been littered with traumatic United States event. It
Speaker 1: would be soon that school shootings would become the norm.
Speaker 1: It would become normal that our government, through the Patriot
Speaker 1: Act and passed almost unanimously, would be the beginning of
Speaker 1: surveillance on United States citizens, all with the idea that
Speaker 1: if we gave away our liberties right then our government
Speaker 1: would keep us safe. We would never think that twenty
Speaker 1: years later you would be using the same tools that
Speaker 1: were to combat terrorism that put in the wrong hands
Speaker 1: like that of Donald Trump, would be used to surveil
Speaker 1: those that are fighting for justice or politicians that he
Speaker 1: just didn't like. Surveillance, it seems, has become our way
Speaker 1: of life, and we didn't realize that nine to eleven
Speaker 1: was the gateway drug to that right two hour or
Speaker 1: Willian present the days following nine to eleven. I can
Speaker 1: remember first that once I was reunited that later that
Speaker 1: late afternoon on nine to eleven with my boyfriend at
Speaker 1: the time, who ended up having to walk from his
Speaker 1: job in DC all the way back to Arlington because
Speaker 1: traffic was that bad. People had abandoned their cars. There
Speaker 1: was just the panic in the air was palpable. When
Speaker 1: he finally reached back to where we were living at
Speaker 1: the time, we decided to go out and see what
Speaker 1: was going on in the streets. Right empty, completely and
Speaker 1: totally empty. It was equivalent to what we saw during
Speaker 1: the shutdown in New York City, where you were seeing
Speaker 1: these iconic pictures of Times Square, in Central Park and
Speaker 1: Washington Square Park in all of these places, just completely empty.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what it looked like in Arlington, Virginia. Not
Speaker 1: a person, not a soul, was on the street. Everyone
Speaker 1: was in their house, glued to their television wondering what
Speaker 1: was going to happen next. Was this the beginning of
Speaker 1: a larger attack? Now, remember there were multiple planes that
Speaker 1: were going around, and one of them was headed squarely
Speaker 1: towards the White House, but somehow was either shot down
Speaker 1: or missed, or what have you. We would later hear
Speaker 1: phone calls, last calls of those that were on the
Speaker 1: planes that hit the towers to their loved ones, saying goodbye.
Speaker 1: For families would forever be changed. Over three thousand Americans
Speaker 1: died that day. While it was a time where I
Speaker 1: would say that I remember the country really coming together
Speaker 1: and George W. Bush was president and telling us that
Speaker 1: we were going to get through this together as Americans.
Speaker 1: I think about that in hindsight and in comparison to
Speaker 1: going to war with a virus, and how Donald Trump
Speaker 1: could have presented the American people with the same thoughts
Speaker 1: of unity, with the same thoughts of we will get
Speaker 1: through this traumatic, terrible time, but we will do so together.
Speaker 1: But of course we know that he squandered that opportunity.
Speaker 1: But when George W. Bush said those things, there was
Speaker 1: something that passed my mind, and it was I wonder
Speaker 1: whatnicity the people are that attacked our country. And that
Speaker 1: is always a thing that has always been thought in
Speaker 1: my head. Anytime that somebody had ever said anything about
Speaker 1: a shooting or a robbing or whatever, my fear is
Speaker 1: always said, it's going to be a person of color,
Speaker 1: which means that then an entire community is going to
Speaker 1: be victimized. Well, that is exactly what happened post nine
Speaker 1: to eleven, that once the ethnicities of the terrorists were
Speaker 1: revealed to be of Middle Eastern descent, to be of
Speaker 1: the Muslim faith. Mind you, there are over a billion
Speaker 1: Muslims in the world right over a billion people worship Islam.
Speaker 1: And yet we in this country decided that every single
Speaker 1: one of those millions of people were in fact terrorists.
Speaker 1: Muslim Americans were surveiled, they were followed, they were threatened,
Speaker 1: they were beat up, and worse, now, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: we began to fear our neighbors in a way that
Speaker 1: we never had before, all because of what these nineteen
Speaker 1: hijackers did. That is it for Today's Woke, a f
Speaker 1: daily podcast. To hear more from me, including five full
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