Someone Call 911

I thought I would have had my life without telling my children I witnessed a war. To me, my father talked about them like they were legends of epic proportions, not real scenarios that last years, taking the lives of many like chess pieces on a board. This is a game, isn’t it? Before the attacks of 9.11 I never really knew what war was other than in history class. In a way it was like a myth. Then it became a reality. At the time of the attacks I was out home skipping school. On the television the news break through my show and it showed the disasters and wave of smoke engulfing New York.

I didn’t get it- only being in Briscoe Middle School in Beverly, Ma. My parents however held a face of grief that to this day seems still stuck, unable to completely peel away. I’m twenty-three years old. I understand what war means now from the eyes of a United States citizen. To watch the documentaries, read all the articles, see people who have lost someone. Luckily, I have not lost anyone that day because I could of. My father before his retirement a few years ago had been a firefighter for Peabody Massachusetts and felt the pain of his fellow brothers of New York being lost in the flames of the Twin Towers.

For me it’s difficult to see the photographs of Falling Man-I get emotionally every time because out of desperation someone took control of their life and ended it the way they wanted to. But even that shouldn’t have happened. But thus I get to my point- that we have no control of our lives anymore but we can with strength. With each new President, comes more disappoint, destruction and the disappearance of the middle class. Many feel stranded and helpless as the people supposed to protect us are the prime suspects forcing us into poverty. The land of the free and home of the brave is becoming the land of the empty houses and the streets of the dead and I have to ask myself, how did we get to this point?

The United States is in distress, will anyone listen or will we go on until there is nothing left and Death has called ‘checkmate’?


-Sara McClory/ writer, concerned citizen