United Through Tragedy On November 6th of 2016, I interviewed my 60-year old father, Stewart Baxter, regarding the most significant event in his life. Stewart was born on April 29, 1956 in Evanston, Illinois and he was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. This interview was conducted in person and notes were recorded throughout the interview on a laptop. Before conducting the interview, I provided my father with a preview of what topic the interview would cover. Specifically, I shared that I would be asking about an event in his lifetime that he believes is the most significant. Given time to think about the many national, global, and local events that have taken place in his lifetime, he was able to choose one that he believes to be the most …show more content…
I was 4 when the attacks took place and don’t remember much about them. Unlike my father, I do not know exactly what I was doing when the planes were hijacked and I was completely unaware of what was actually going on at the time. Years after the attacks, I was searching through some magazines in my home when I came across a Time magazine covering the attack. Only after I found the article did I actually understand what happened on September 11th, 2001. The memories I have of 9/11 will greatly differ from my father’s. Similarly, victims, first responders, and victim’s families will have different memories of this day. It was also surprising to learn of the effects my father saw in the country. Rather than recalling the many lives lost, he remembers the feeling of unity that resulted from the attacks. In interviewing my father, I became aware of how differently we all remember events. While I recognize the significance of the event and the great impact it had on our country having, I have very little memory of the day. My father remembers nearly every detail of that day and he remembers the impact it had on himself and on society. I will never be able to remember 9/11 in the same way my father does, but interviewing him provided me with a greater understanding of how the attacks may be
In 2010 author Andre Dubus III had an excerpt published called “My Father Was a Writer”. The author writes about how his father who was a Marine and how life was as a military family. Eventually the stresses of being a Marine took its toll on the relationship between his father and the family. In 1963, the author’s grandfather passed away and not long after his father retired from The Marines and traveled down a new path and was accepted into Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As time went by the father’s life began to change. From hugging and kissing his wife to letting his appearance change from clean cut and shaved to growing his hair and having a mustache. Showing the author and his siblings more attention from sitting with them at night just to tell
David Stark Latta is my mother's step-father, he was born on December 6, 1937 in Pontiac, Michigan and has spent most of his life here. David raised my mother and three other children from his previous marriage. My grandfather and I talked for about an hour or so, the interview became more of a conversation, it was very comfortable for him to talk to me about his life, and no question was really off limits; him and I have a wonderful and close relationship. When the interview began he turned town the television and offered me a beer, and I started with asking him about his childhood. He told me that when he was an adolescence he would spend most of his summer days swimming with the his friends in a gravel pit turned lake. They would play baseball in the fields next to Maceday Lake, which is well a well known local lake, and go camping on the weekends at the Pontiac recreational area. These kids that he grew up with in high school still remain in close contact with my grandfather. He tells me that around 11 or 12 of them get together at the local coney island almost ev...
In this memoir, James gives the reader a view into his and his mother's past, and how truly similar they were. Throughout his life, he showed the reader that there were monumental events that impacted his life forever, even if he
The day was September 11th, 2001, a moment in history that will never be forgotten by any American living at the time. It was in the early morning hours on this day that our nation experienced the single most devastating terrorist attack ever carried out on American soil. Images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center, news coverage of buildings on fire, and images of building rubble will forever be imprinted into the history of this great nation. However, it was on one of the darkest days for America that one of the most impassioned speeches ever given by a United States president was spoken. President George W. Bush’s speech addressing the nation after the “9/11” attacks was infused with pathos through his imagery of destruction and
The 1960’s was a time of war, politics, and a trip to the moon. For some it was a turbulent time filled with chaos, while for others it was a peaceful, prosperous time. For my grandfather, Robert Mammini, it was the decade of his life where he would settle down, start a family, and experience a most memorable decade. He was married in 1961 at the age of 24 to my grandma, Mary Mammini. During this decade his family expanded and he had three children. His first born Kim, my mom was born in 1962, followed by my uncle in 1964 and later my aunt in 1966. He and my grandmother lived in Concord, California just several blocks from Clayton Valley High School. It’s weird to think they lived two minutes from where I live now. With my grandma’s hands full with three kids it was up to my grandpa to be the working man. He worked at James Nelson Company, a booming heating and air conditioning company, in San Francisco where he made good wages and was given great benefits. With the good pay my grandfather was able to easily afford a brand new home priced at $22,000, which included 3 beds and 2 baths. This decade was the start of a long ride for the Mammini family filled with incredible world events that we will never experience again.
John Wayne was a psychopath who authorities should not have let out on parole and released him early of his sentence. He murdered 33 people and enjoyed every single death. No normal human being would enjoy killing someone.
“Tragedy of tragedies” is one way to define the 9/11 attack that shook the very roots of the United States. No one in their right mind had thought that such cataclysmic and consternating as this could happen in the United States. No police force or the special surveillance was prepared for this kind of inland terrorist attack through the means of an airway jet. No fighter was trained before, to react to such sort of emergency. Neither were jet planes kept ready to fire out missiles that can prevent airborne terrorism, nor did any president had to take any urgent steps and make decisions under such rather heart shattering pressure exerted by throughout the world. What happened on September 11, 2001 not only gave us a petrifying instance of the capabilities of the human mind, but also showed us the warmer extremity of the human race. The greatest outcome of people heading to New York to help evacuate people, restore New York City, and sympathize ove...
Luminet, O., Curci, A., Marsh, E. J., Wessel, I., & al, e. (2004). The cognitive, emotional, and social impacts of the September 11 attacks: Group differences in memory for the reception context and the determinants of flashbulb memory. The Journal of General Psychology, 131(3), 197-224. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.fiu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/213650518?accountid=10901
When the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011 rocked New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C., the word “tragedy” was used on a grandiose level around the world. For the people who lived close enough to experience the events first-hand, they may not have even called it a tragedy; perhaps they called it a misfortune, retaliation, lack of a strong government, unreal, or maybe even rebirth. In the coming years after the attacks, everything between standing united as a nation to declaring a war had flourished; but how has that left us - the land that has no distinct ethnicity - feel about each other? Why is it that fear is usually missing in the affective mnemonics of memorial sites, which, after all, are signifiers of some of the most horrific violence in human history? Do memorials dedicated to these attacks bring us together in terms of understanding, or is it just continual collective grief? This paper will cover the global complexity of the 9/11 attacks, the Empty Sky 9/11 Memorial in Liberty State Park, NJ, and factors and theories that memorials do influence a sense of complexity. The ground of public memory is always in motion, shifting with the tectonics of national identity. I chose the Empty Sky 9/11 Memorial as my topic of observation as I, personally, visit a few times throughout the year to pay respects to people I personally knew who perished in the attacks to the World Trade Center. I was in the 5th grade when this happened, and had absolutely no clue what was going on until my father did not return home until two days later with a bandage wrapped around his head and his devastating recollection of what happened just before he arrived to his job. The emotions that I feel within myself compared to others will...
The article “How Our Brains Make Memories” explains how traumatic events and the memories they hold can become forgotten over time. Karim Nader recalls the day that two planes slammed into the twin towers in New York City and like almost every person in the United States he had vivid and emotional memories of that day. However he knew better than to trust his recollections of that day because he was an expert on memory. He attended college at the University of Toronto and in 1996 joined the New York University lab of Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist who studies how emotions influence memory. Fast forward to 2003, Nader is now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, where he says “his memory of
“If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.” This quotation by James Arthur Baldwin helps to bring about one of the main points of his essay, “Notes of a Native Son.” Baldwin’s composition was published in 1955, and based mostly around the World War II era. This essay was written about a decade after his father’s death, and it reflected back on his relationship with his father. At points in the essay, Baldwin expressed hatred, love, contempt, and pride for his father, and Baldwin broke down this truly complex relationship in his analysis. In order to do this, he wrote the essay as if he were in the past, still with his father, but reflecting on the events of the era, both private and public, from his point of view. He partially accomplished this since he experienced events of the era first hand, showing that only an African American could have written the essay as he did. James Baldwin throughout the essay hovered from his own personal life to the world around him and his father. Baldwin weaves between narration and analysis in order to show that his own experiences dealing with the public world and his private world were similar to many other Americans at that time.
More than a year and a half ago, on September 11, 2001, a group of terrorists from the al Qaeda network hijacked four airliners and successfully used three of them to attack the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the World Trade Center in New York. These attacks marked the first time in American history that a full-scale attack was executed on our own soil, and they affected the American people on a number of different levels. Americans found themselves shocked that such an event could occur, as well as reeling with grief for the more than 3,000 people who died in the tragedy. Soon, the shock and grief that penetrated the hearts of the American people gave way, in part, to a sense of national pride. American flags waved from every overpass, and “God Bless America” could be heard on every r...
For most American’s their Tuesday morning on September 11, 2001 started off like any other week day. Families were doing their normal routine taking their children to school and heading off to work within hours may people would be participating in un- thought of duties. No one had any idea that by the end of the day what seemed like a normal Tuesday would forever be remembered in American history. Within minutes of 8:46 AM all Americans would know that this was not a normal Tuesday. This day would hold not one, but four attempted terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda on the United States. Two attacks on the World Trade Center, one attack on the Pentagon, and a failed attempt on the White House.
Just as our parents and grandparents remember where they were and what they were doing when President John F. Kennedy was shot, so will it be with this generation when asked the same questions pertaining to September 11, 2001. This horrific event will be a scar on the body of our wonderful nation until the end of time. Parents lost children, children lost parents, spouses lost their heartmates – so much anguish and emotional devastation demands that something be done to prevent tragedy like this from occurring in the future. This is why President George W. Bush created the Office of Homeland Security.
My father passed away in 1991, two weeks before Christmas. I was 25 at the time but until then I had not grown up. I was still an ignorant youth that only cared about finding the next party. My role model was now gone, forcing me to reevaluate the direction my life was heading. I needed to reexamine some of the lessons he taught me through the years.