The 2001 WPI fellows were in Chicago on Sept. 11 when terrorists attacked the U.S. Click on the names to read their initial reactions upon hearing the news.

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WPI’s 2001 fellows react
to the terrorist attacks on U.S.

The flight that brought me from Bucharest to Minneapolis was not just a connection between the Old Continent and the New World. It also was supposed to leave behind a lot of fears, nightmares and disillusions.

It was on Sept. 11 that this mirror was broken. … The intelligence agencies a whole world respected failed in preventing the attacks, the perfect army missed the commercial planes transformed into lethal weapons, and Superman seemed to have been busy elsewhere.

Paradoxically, the attack that took thousands of innocent American lives also brought this country closer to the rest of the world. America experienced pain, tears, destruction and death in its own yard. Its people were no longer watching remote wars from their armchairs. It was their own friends and families in front of the cameras.

As a journalist I was very angry that I could not fly to New York immediately after the attack. But I soon realized that the most important aspects could be noticed anywhere in the country — ordinary citizens giving blood, buying flags and getting ready to sacrifice everything for their country.

Since Sept. 11, the word “globalization” has a new definition. The assault disrupted the world’s financial network, citizens of some 40 countries lost their lives and the pain the Americans felt touched the souls of people around the world.

The U.S. declared war on terrorism. My country, Poland, is a member of NATO and because the Article 5 provision of the treaty has been invoked, we, too, will have to learn what it means to be in a state of war.

Like all great societies, America is a mix of many moods. This diversity, if that be the word, is reflected in the reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. America is angry, America is apprehensive. Citizen America is patriotic, Corporate Citizen America is panicky.

It may sound naïve and cliched but at the most basic level Sept. 11 has made Americans interested in their country and the world once again. The injury done to the Manhattan skyline and to the Pentagon scarred every heart. Take for example Macon, Georgia, a city of some 120,000 people 85 miles south of Atlanta. Macon is America’s Timbuktu, as interior and insular a town as can be. Its local newspaper, The Telegraph, sells 70,000 copies a day, packing its columns with reports on the performance of the teachers in the town’s schools and colleges.

On Sept. 12, The Telegraph deviated from form. It devoted its edition to New York and Washington, Osama bin Laden and jihad – names, places, concepts that seemed so remote and far away. The paper doubled its print run and sold 140,000 copies, more than one per town resident. Macon had rediscovered America. So had the rest of the United States.

Like its stock indices, America’s heartbeat is forever linked to sentiment. In 1918, as World War I drew to a close, a Russian migrant called Irving Berlin wrote a stirring song called God Bless America. Virtually forgotten for 20 years, it came back to Uncle Sam’s lips when the Nazi danger beckoned. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan used the phrase to end his speeches.

In recent months, President Bush borrowed the Reagan practice and reintroduced the phrase to public life. Few paid attention, until the president’s speech on the evening of Sept. 11. Suddenly the song was reborn. From East to West, Midwest to South, Americans sang God Bless America at operas and baseball games, on the steps of the Capitol, at the re-commencement of trading on Wall Street.

There were two ways of interpreting the renewal of America’s contract with God. One, America was ready once again for a war it believed was just. Two, America, symbol of the ultimate in human ingenuity, was suddenly unsure. In a sense, both were true. America had been stirred — but it also had been shaken.

Silvia Ruano is a staff reporter at El Norte in Monterrey. She reports on medicine, science and the performing arts and writes a weekly column answering readers’ health questions.

For the first time in history, a terrorist attack went far beyond the mere impact of a bomb. This time, the strike clearly showed that even superpowers can be vulnerable. Furthermore, it made this whole nation, accustomed to thinking and feeling itself the center of the universe, reflect on its relationship with the rest of the world. On Sept. 11, the blood was not shed in unknown and faraway lands, millions of miles away. The tragedy occurred in the economic and military centers of the U.S. …

Maybe that’s why questions like “Why?” or “From where comes all that hate?” were repeated almost every day in conversations, in the editorial pages of newspapers and magazines as well as on TV shows. With flags at half mast and many (people) in prayer and holding hands, millions of inhabitants of this country tried to answer the questions, while President George Bush and his Cabinet prepared the proper response to the terrorist attack. …

As a terrified outsider, I was completely sure that no matter what happened, the image I awoke to on Tuesday, Sept. 11, would stay forever in my memory and in the memory of the rest of the planet. The history of the 21st century changed that morning and neither New York, the U.S. nor the world would ever be the same.

Fifty years from now, my child, or my grandchild, may ask me about the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, in the same way that I asked my parents about the day when humans got to the moon and my grandparents about the start of World War II.

I will tell him or her that I was in Chicago that day, taking a shower in a hotel room when the first plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. The telephone rang, and one of my WPI colleagues told me and my roommate to turn on the TV. We did it just in time to see the second plane hitting the other tower.

It took me a few minutes to believe my eyes. It was just like one of those Hollywood movies in which a bunch of terrorists or aliens try to conquer the world by first destroying an enduring symbol, like the Statue of Liberty or the White House. Then I realized that what I was seeing was real. Real people were dying and more tragedies were happening in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

This could be the beginning of a world conflict, I thought at the moment. And I was sure that nothing would ever be the way it used to be. That made me feel afraid. The descriptions of panic and horror touched me deeply and I couldn’t help thinking that I was lucky to be so far from New York.

As a journalist, however, I cursed my luck. I was in the right country, at the right time but in the wrong city. The only thing I could do that my newspaper couldn’t get from the news services was to write a non-American view of the U.S. reaction to the terrible attack. And so I did.

Like my WPI colleagues that terrible Tuesday morning, I turned on the TV to CNN. I heard that the first plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. I thought it was just an accident. Ten minutes later, I watched the second plane crashing into the south tower. I knew something more serious had happened. I was eager to know why and who did it.

I recalled the bombing of Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier. But this time, the enemy was anonymous. Obviously, it was deliberately organized. I didn’t know if it was an isolated terrorism crime or the beginning of a new war.

I reconsidered the meaning of globalization. The World Trade Center was a symbol of globalization. Hundreds of companies from every corner of the world flocked to this skyscraper to operate their transnational businesses. The terrorists’ target was America, but the victims were from about 30 different countries. If the United States retaliated against those responsible living in Afghanistan, it would rely on Pakistan's airspace, Israel's intelligence, and moral support from Britain and other countries. If the U.S. economy declined as a result of this attack, stock markets around the world would slump.

My host media family in Minnesota where I had briefly stayed asked me in an e-mail why America is hated by so many people. I don't know. But sometimes I think America is too meddlesome. It is used to evaluating other countries by its own values. That’s why anti- American sentiment was inflated among Chinese youth after the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. For a long while, some Americans regarded China as a threat replacing Russia after the Cold War. I hoped America would recognize who its real enemy was after this horrible attack.

Nevertheless, I don’t like any kind of terrorism. I don’t appreciate people killing people for religious reasons. It's terrible to kill so many innocent civilians.

Like most of humanity, I never expected terrorism of this magnitude to wreak havoc on American soil. Sure, a well-planned and brazen act like this could be executed with little difficulty in, say, the Philippines, given the inept intelligence and security measures in place in my country. But not America.

Since I prefer getting my news in print, I have no idea what pushed me to switch on the TV set that fateful Tuesday morning. Still, the notion that it was another terrorist attempt to bring down the twin towers never crossed my mind as smoke billowed and flames consumed one of them.

Before heading downstairs for a quick breakfast, I brushed it aside as another freak accident that would keep Mayor Rudy Gulliani and the brave men and women of the New York City Fire Department on their toes all day long. But I was wrong—very wrong.

When I came back to our hotel room several minutes later, two towers were now inflames.

“Terrorists?” An unbelieving me turned to my roommate for an answer. “Of course,” he shot back.

… How could America the Mighty allow this to happen? If someone could do this to the United States, what could stop them from blasting the rest of the world into oblivion?

Thus began a long day of unanswered questions, shocking revelations and heart-wrenching accounts as details of the magnitude of the attack started filtering in. One thing now seems clear: America as you and I know it will never be the same again.

It happened by mere coincidence that on the day prior to the tragic Sept. 11 the WPI fellows were on a sightseeing river cruise, observing the exciting architecture of Chicago. The tour was an incredible symphony of glass and light, the beautiful reflections in the water, the tall, daring buildings mirroring one another. It was a day to celebrate creativity, the human spirit, the imagination of American architects and technology. On the next day I was doomed to see the destruction, the debris, the smoke, what remained from the beautiful, tall, daring buildings in New York City when two hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center. I will forever bear in mind these two images together, next to each other, exactly as they happened in their sequence of time — the images of Chicago and of New York, of creativity and destruction, my own inspiration which ended so abruptly in despair.