By Kyle Roberts
My green, landline telephone rang around 8 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001.
I was living at our Ruston home during my time as Louisiana Tech student, and I had secured a part-time job at the campus post office and office services department.
The Caller-ID on my bedroom phone indicated it was my boss. By this point, I had not turned on my bulbous television yet that morning, as I was sleeping in to prep for biology class. I wasn’t scheduled to work that day, so I was naturally confused when I picked up and said a groggy, “Hello?”
“We’re under attack!” yelled my office services boss through the receiver. “Someone bombed New York and just bombed the Pentagon. It’s all over the news.”
Weird prank, but I’ll bite, I thought. Sure enough, I turned on the TV to see what I perceived as a bombing of the twin towers in NYC.
Rarely in my life have I been so gobsmacked that I froze. This was one of those moments.
Over the course of the day (which included classes that I did not skip, thank you very much), there was confusion and fear — a real fog of war situation on Louisiana Tech’s campus. We all did our best to go about our day in our zombified states. Don’t ask me what the topic was in Biology 201.
I remember going to the Tech post office that afternoon, even though I was not scheduled for work. I just needed to see people. We were all starting to piece together that this was not a bombing, but rather a highly sophisticated hijacking. We started to understand the “how” that day, but it would be a long time before we ever truly figured out the “who.” We threw out our best theories, tried to make it make sense, and ultimately scattered as fewer and fewer people stayed on campus as the day passed.
As that Tuesday day went on and the news continued, it felt like there was a fire hydrant of information. It was indiscernible noise to my 19-year-old mind. But then that night, nearly 150 members of Congress bravely walked onto the steps of Capitol Hill to sing “God Bless America.” And I say bravely on purpose — if you were alive on Sept. 11, 2001, you had no idea how safe anything was going to be in the immediate future. Lawmakers gathered publicly in Washington, D.C., and chose to defy the terror of the day just a drive away from where one of the planes struck the Pentagon — nearly four miles away.
While it was hardly The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir as far as singing talent went, it was a tour de force in calming the terrified American people down if only for a short while.
A lot has happened in these 1,300 Tuesdays. It feels absurd to ask political figures to agree on anything in 2026 from separate party aisles. If a Republican says the sky is blue, a Democrat will fight to say it’s red. If Democrat says water is good for your body, then a Republican will fight to say that only Diet Mountain Dew can properly hydrate you. We’re so divided that the most foundation of truths must be countered if it comes from outside our respective tribes. Zero chance we see lawmakers singing anything together today.
And (/oldmanshakesfistatcloud.gif)…. can you imagine social media on Sept. 11, 2001? The lies, the misinformation, the AI slop… I shudder to think of how we would respond if 9/11 had happened today. I daresay – I don’t think it would be good.
But looking back, all these years later, it’s the simple, bi-partisan, united effort that has been burned in my mind about that day. A terrible choir of lawmakers singing on the step. When partisan attacks, slanders, and lies were set aside for a moment of unity and normalcy. A simple song in the midst of the most chaotic event in a generation.
That’s the unity and normalcy I crave. That’s the United States I hope to live in again one day.
