An editorial for our listeners in Huntsville, New Waverly, Willis, Trinity, and the surrounding communities
I still remember the exact chair I was sitting in when the second plane hit.
I had just finished my morning show on KAVX in Lufkin when the screen in front of me showed something no one had a word for yet. A second plane. A second tower. In that instant, everyone watching understood this was not an accident. I remember how young the day still was, and how much worse it was about to get.
We went to national news coverage that morning and didn’t come back off it until nearly midnight. Hour after hour, the day kept getting heavier — the towers falling, the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania, a nation trying to understand in real time what had just happened to it. I have never forgotten what it felt like to sit with that, on air, hour after hour, as a whole country grieved together in real time.
I share that memory with you not because it’s unique — nearly everyone over the age of thirty has their own version of it, their own “where I was” — but because radio was built for days like that one. When the world doesn’t make sense, people don’t turn to their phones or their screens first. They turn to a voice they trust, in a place they call home, trying to make sense of it alongside them. That’s what we did that day. It’s what stations like ours still do, in small towns and county seats across this country, every single day since.
What I remember most, though, isn’t the horror of that morning. It’s what came after.
I remember the President standing on a pile of rubble at Ground Zero with a bullhorn, telling rescue workers that the whole world would hear from us soon. I remember members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans who couldn’t agree on the weather most days — standing shoulder to shoulder on the Capitol steps, singing “God Bless America” together, because for one moment there was no red or blue, only red, white, and blue. I remember firehouses from Texas to New York taking up collections for brother and sister firefighters they’d never met. I remember blood banks running out of bags because so many people showed up to give. I remember churches filling up on a Tuesday night. I remember flags — on porches, on pickup trucks, on lapels, on courthouse lawns across Texas — more flags than any of us had seen since maybe World War II.
That’s the part of 9/11 we owe to ourselves to remember, just as hard as the tragedy: what we became in its shadow, even if only for a little while. A nation that showed up for each other. Neighbors who checked on neighbors. Strangers who became volunteers overnight. A country that eventually saw justice done, and slowly, imperfectly, began to heal.
Twenty-five years is long enough that we now have young people in our listening area who weren’t alive that day — who know September 11th only from history books and documentaries, the way earlier generations knew Pearl Harbor. That’s exactly why local voices matter in telling this story. It’s one thing to read a date in a textbook. It’s another to hear it from someone who was there, who felt the day get heavier with each passing hour, who remembers not just what was lost but what was found in the days that followed.
So this week, we ask you to do something simple: pause and remember — the lives lost, the first responders who ran toward danger, the service members who answered the call in the years since, and the ordinary Americans who, for a while, remembered we’re all in this together.
That spirit is still available to us. It doesn’t take a tragedy to bring it out. It just takes us choosing it.
We’ll never forget.
