This week we reflect on some of the major historical events that I witnessed in my 68 years on this planet. We especially talk about my recollections of 9/11 given that this episode will be released on that anniversary. Although I tried to keep this podcast in a listenable format, the YouTube version has lots of interesting images and video clips so you might want to check out the YouTube version instead of the cardioversion. Note there are brief images from 9/11 but none of them are explicit.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 33 of Contemplating Life.

A quick note to say there are lots of video clips in the YouTube version of today’s podcast so you may want to try the YouTube version. You can find links in the description of the video excerpted here as well as lots of Wikipedia links that will be of special interest.

After taking a couple of weeks off, it’s time to figuratively roll up my sleeves and get to writing again.

After spending over 15 weeks looking back on my life in school, it got me thinking about how much history I have witnessed in the past 68 years. I’ve lived through a lot of stuff. Recently, I was talking to one of my home health aides about this. She’s an African-American woman in her early 30s. Many of the things I was talking about were before she was born. I told her, “I’m really old. I’ve witnessed a lot of interesting events in my lifetime. I watched people walk on the moon live on TV.”

“Yeah, I guess you really are old if you remember seeing people walk on the moon. Next thing you’re going to be telling me you saw Martin Luther King walking around too.”

“Not in person. But I remember very well watching the news flash interrupt my TV show when he was killed. Bobby Kennedy too.”

“Holy shit I didn’t think you were that old!”

In her mind, MLK was ancient history. I said to her, “You can do the math, can’t you? I’m 68 years old. MLK was killed in 1968. I was 13 years old at the time.”

A couple of years ago when it was the 20th anniversary of 9/11 I had a home health aide who was only 19 years old. It freaked me out that 9/11 was before she was born. That really made me feel old.

I decided I would do a few episodes about some of the major historical events I’ve witnessed over my lifetime.

My mother was a very political person. She was a lifelong Democrat and a Roman Catholic so naturally, she was very excited when John F. Kennedy was running for president. I was in kindergarten at the time. My Aunt Jody took care of me on election day because Mom had volunteered to work at the polls. My aunt didn’t live far from my house and they rerouted the school bus a couple of blocks to pick me up at her place.

I could sense Mom’s enthusiasm for JFK as a candidate and really saw her joy when he was elected. She tried to explain to me that it was a big deal because we never had a Catholic president before. I asked why is it a big deal. She explained that a lot of people didn’t like Catholics. Fortunately, it was something I never experienced personally. I was aware that Catholics were somehow different from other Christians but it was more along the lines of, “That’s weird,” rather than “You are horrible for being Catholic.”

My mother watched the Today Show every morning. That brought me news of the first significant world event that I recall – the Cuban missile crisis. American spy planes had detected that Russian missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads were being deployed in in Cuba just 90 miles from Florida. President Kennedy established a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent further Russian ships from delivering weapons. I could sense that my mother was deeply disturbed by the news. Many people were justifiably concerned that we were on the brink of a nuclear war.

I have very distinct memories of uttering the sentence, “What’s a ‘blockade’ mommy?” I once told that story to a friend at church who was my age. She said, “Yes I remember that distinctly as well. But we lived in Alaska. My parents were scared that if the missiles flew out of Cuba, the land invasion would be right on top of us.”

Ever since I was very young I’ve been fascinated by space travel. When I was telling stories about my kindergarten days, I forgot to mention that in my kindergarten class, we Had a TV in the classroom and watched Alan Shepard as he became the first American into space on his suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. My classmates were upset that it interrupted their favorite children’s show Captain Kangaroo. I thought they were all crazy. I liked Captain Kangaroo a lot but this was a guy sitting on top of a rocket going into outer space for the first time. That was way more cool.

The next big world event that I lived through with vivid memories is of course the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I already told that story in Episode 16. I was eight years old in the third grade.

If you know any US history from that era, you know that 1968 was a huge year. As I previously mentioned, I was watching TV on April 4, 1968, when they announced that Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis that night holding a political rally in a park when the news came down. He announced to a crowd of mostly black voters that MLK had been killed. He gave an amazing speech that night to keep the crowd calm. Here are some excerpts from what he said. you can see the entire speech in a YouTube video linked in the description.

[Insert video here]

They subsequently raised a monument on that spot to commemorate what he did. Indianapolis was one of the largest cities that did not have riots that evening in response to the MLK assassination. Portions of that speech also on the RFK Memorial in Wellington National Cemetery. Just 68 days after the MLK assassination Robert Kennedy was killed as well.

In August of that year, my family took our first out-of-state vacation. We went to Chicago and spent three days visiting museums. I’ve been back there on two other occasions and really love the city.

While we were there, protesters were already gathering in Grant Park in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention that was just a couple of weeks away. Weeks later I watched on TV in shock and horror at the chaos inside and outside the convention. Inside the convention, there were disagreements over alternative slates of delegates. As one rejected delegate was being thrown out of the venue, CBS reporter Dan Rather was roughed up by security guards as he tried to interview the man. Outside the convention, Mayor Richard Daley became fearful of threats made by the protesters and sent massive amounts of police and National Guard troops to break up the protests. Protesters were brutally beaten by police on national TV. On several occasions, I have jokingly quipped, “Yeah, I was in Chicago in ‘68. I’ll never forget the sites I saw. The Yippies gathering in Grant Park not knowing the fate that awaited them.” When I tell that story, I leave out the part that I was only 13 years old and was visiting museums with my mommy and daddy. I wasn’t exactly plugged into the Yippie scene at that young age.

While we were vacationing in Chicago, the Republican National Convention was going on in Miami. One evening we watched some of it on TV in the hotel room.

Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar gave an address at the convention. I remember that as the keynote address but my research says Ronald Reagan gave the official keynote. It was still a major speech that put him on the national stage. Referral at the convention, someone gave him the unfortunate title “Nixon’s Favorite Mayor.” Not that I want to have anything to do with but he was my favorite Mayor and US Sen. as well. Lugar was one of the few Republicans I’ve ever voted for. When he was mayor, he established something called the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped and was a staunch advocate for a variety of disability issues both as mayor and later as US Senator. I heard him speak on campus at IUPUI one time and he was amazing. I had great respect for the man. He not only fought for Indiana issues, but he was also famous for the Nunn-Lugar Act on the disarmament of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

In 2012 he faced a serious primary challenge from radical conservative “TEA Party” candidate Richard Mourdock. Mourdock held bizarre views such as the idea that if a woman was raped and conceived a child, it was God’s will. I crossed over and voted in the Republican primary that year to try to help Lugar stay in office. Unfortunately, Mourdock defeated Luger in the Republican primary. Democrat Joe Donnelly won the general election despite the fact that Indiana is a mostly red state.

Lugar never held political office again. He died in April 2019.

Anyway… Back to 1968 again.

The highlight of 1968 for me and for many people was the mission of Apollo 8. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, circled the moon in December 1968. It was the furthest that human beings had ever traveled from Earth at the time. In a live television broadcast on Christmas Eve, they read verses from the book of Genesis about the creation of the Earth and then wished everyone Merry Christmas back on the Good Earth.

When they returned, they released a very famous photo called “Earthrise” showing the distant earth rising above the horizon of the moon. Seeing the Earth from that perspective created a lot of healing at the end of that troubled year that saw the Vietnam War, peace protests met with violence, and the assassination of two major political leaders who were men of peace.

* * *

Rather than go through a continued chronological telling of my recollections of major world events, we’re going to skip ahead to September 11, 2001. This episode will premiere on September 11 (although Patreon subscribers will get it a week early).

In those days, I typically didn’t get out of bed until around 10:30 or 11:00 AM. My mother, as she had done since I was a child, was watching the Today Show that morning. She came in and woke me up saying, “An airplane has hit the World Trade Center. Do you want to turn on the Today Show?”

I told her, “Wow! I remember hearing that back in the 1940s.a military plane crashed into the Empire State Building on a foggy night.”

I turned on the TV mounted on the wall over my bed and was surprised to see a clear, bright, sunshiny day in New York City. Whatever caused this, it wasn’t fog or visibility problems. They were saying that it was a “commuter plane.” Having never flown before, my image of a “commuter plane” was perhaps a twin-engine propeller aircraft holding perhaps 12-15 people. I certainly wasn’t thinking of a 767.

Along with millions of other people around the world, I watched live as the second plane hit the South Tower. It amazed me that it disappeared into the building and nothing but flame and debris exited the opposite side. Along with everyone else, I came to the realization that this was no accident.

I sat through the endless replays of the event. Some of the cameras broadcasting the scene were tilted very slightly and at several points, Mom and I thought it looked as though one or both of the World Trade Center buildings was going to fall over sideways. In retrospect, I should’ve known it wouldn’t happen that way.

My next recollection was NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski was put on the air live from the Pentagon. Here is part of his report.

[Insert Video here]

A few minutes later, he returned to the air to confirm that he had spoken to a high-ranking military man (I think it was a general but I’m not sure). He reported that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon near the helicopter landing area.

I don’t recall the exact sequence of events and I’m not going to bother researching just to tell the story but we eventually learned of the fourth plane crashing in Shanksville Pennsylvania.

The thought that was going to everyone’s head at this point was, “How big is this? How many other crashes will we have?” It was no longer isolated to New York City.

I think it was the next day or soon after I spoke to my friend Judy who had been working in a tall office building in downtown Indianapolis. She said they evacuated the building and sent everyone home.

I distinctly remember the speeches that President Bush gave at a school in Florida that morning as the attacks occurred, at a military base where Air Force One stopped off briefly, and then again at the White House later that evening. I was shocked when I heard that the FAA was shutting down the entire US airspace.

My next recollection from 9/11 was when CNBC correspondent Ron Insana joined the coverage in the studio. In those days, I was a regular viewer of the CNBC business channel because I had about $2000 invested in the stock market and he was one of my favorite correspondents.

He appeared in their New York studios covered in gray dust. It was all over his bald head and the shoulders of his dark gray suit. He told the harrowing story of being near the scene when the first tower collapsed. A giant wave of gray dust rolled down the street. He and an MSNBC cameraman ducked inside a parked car as the sky turned black around them. When it turned into gray dust, they exited the car and a police car picked them up and drove them out of the area only stopping to pick up some injured people and take them to a hospital.

That’s when I burst into tears and began sobbing uncontrollably. Someone who I felt like I knew personally from watching him on TV every day… someone who I admired… someone who was baldheaded wore glasses and was an intellectual like me… they had nearly died. And somehow it all became very real at that instant.

When I saw the footage of the towers collapsing, I felt like slapping my forehead and saying, “Of course, that’s how it looks when a building collapses. Hollywood has it wrong almost every time.” You’ve seen the scenes in post-apocalyptic movies where they show devastated cityscapes. Invariably there will be at least one skyscraper tilted over leaning against another one at least a 30° angle or more. Buildings just aren’t strong enough to stay intact if they ever did fall sideways like that.

Movie special-effects people also never show the vast clouds of dust like we saw during the collapse of the World Trade Center. You would think they would know better because of all the footage we have of controlled demolitions. Those demolitions always create vast clouds of dust that roll down connecting streets for blocks just like we saw from the WTC collapse.

I’ve seen several documentaries about taking down buildings using controlled demolitions. When they blow out the foundation, the entire building starts moving straight down. Once it is in motion, the momentum of all that weight moving, causes the floors to pancake upon one another.

The towers of the World Trade Center were weakened by the burning jet fuel about two-thirds and three-fourths of the way up. Once those gave way, the floors above started moving downwards. That momentum carried through till there was nothing but a pile of rubble. There was a slight twist to the upper floors as one of the towers collapsed but for the most part, it went straight down with the debris cascading out the sides like a gray waterfall.

I imagined Hollywood special effects crews watching the scene and thinking, “We are going to have to come up with new ways to depict buildings collapsing in apocalyptic films.”

That probably seems horribly cold and detached. Over a thousand people were dying in those buildings at that instant and all I could think of was how it would be depicted in movies. I think it’s because, at that moment, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that so many people were dying before my eyes.

To this day, the most haunting thing about those images is the knowledge that there were people in wheelchairs stranded in those buildings. Disabled occupants were told that the standard procedure in case of emergency was to make their way to one of the mid-level lobby floors and shelter in place until they could be rescued. A story emerged post-9/11 of a man who died because he stayed behind to sit with his disabled friend in a power wheelchair who could not get down the stairways. I could imagine a number of my friends possibly doing that for me. It makes me feel blessed and revulsed at the same time.

When I was attending IUPUI at the 38th St. campus, the elevator went out in the Krannert Building one day. A couple of my friends had to carry me in my wheelchair down two and a half flights of stairs. Another time I was visiting my friend Judy at her job at the Church Federation when the elevator went out. The janitors cured me down one flight. I could never work or study on a regular basis in any building any taller than a couple of stories.

My house is located near one of the approach flight paths to Indianapolis International Airport. The planes don’t fly directly over my house but we see them as they come from the Northwest to the southeast, turn due South over Speedway, and then head towards the airport. For three days, only military and police aircraft were allowed to fly over the US. When the planes returned to the skies, it seemed eerie to hear them again flying near my home.

Two days later, it was my job to teach a class for Catholic converts at Saint Gabriel Church. I set aside my regular curriculum for half of the class. I did some research by going to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Part of it is organized around the Ten Commandments. I looked under the Fifth Commandment “You shall not kill.”

Among the pertinent topics it discussed was suicide since obviously, this was a suicide mission by the hijackers. It explained that while it might be noble to sacrifice your life in battle, there was a difference between being a casualty of war and going on a deliberate suicide mission. The church of course is completely opposed to suicide.

It also talks about our obligation to constantly work for peace but recognizes that under particular circumstances, participation in war can be justified. Here are a few interesting paragraphs from the Catechism.

In other words, governments have the right to defend their country because we don’t have a global police force.

I always felt that the first Gulf War Where Iraq invaded Kuwait was a reasonably good example of those conditions. Bush 41 tried every means of diplomacy available, put together a broad international coalition, and only attacked when all else said failed. I think that the defense of Ukraine also falls into that category. You had one country illegitimately invading another and Ukraine has every right to self-defense and the support of other nations in that effort.

Anyway, discussing these topics was very difficult to do just two days after 9/11 but I felt we had to do it given the circumstance.

On September 30, 2001, they held the US Formula 1 Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway less than a mile from my house. It was the first major international sporting event after 9/11. People were very worried something might happen but fortunately, it did not. The Indianapolis 500 held each May is the largest single-day spectator sporting event in the world and could be a prime target for terrorist activity but fortunately, we have been spared.

I apologize that this episode is already longer than usual. I think is instructive to look back on history and see the ways that things either have changed or failed to change. As I mentioned before, I’m an aspiring science fiction writer, and often sci-fi tells time travel stories about people who want to change history. Next week I will give you an outline of my little fantasy story of how I would change history if I could. It’s a story that’s been brewing in my mind for many years. I’m going to tell you how that story would have unfolded and why recent events have made that story impossible at least the way I wanted to tell it originally.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.