Where were you?

It is said every generation has their own defining moment, the moment they ask each other about, “Where were you when you heard…?”

For the baby boom generation it was, “Where were you when you heard President Kennedy had been shot?”

For their parents generation it was, “Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?”

And for this generation of young adults, it is, “Where were you on 9/11 when you heard about the Twin Towers?”

I was in my apartment in Warsaw, Poland with my wife. We were expecting the birth of our first child in two weeks.

We were watching something on TV I can’t recall, when my sister-in-law called and said, “Turn to CNN right now!”

We changed the channel and saw the first tower smoking.

Of course I thought terrorism, but I told myself, “It could be an accident,” because I remembered that in 1945, a B-25 bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building.

Then we saw the second plane hit the other tower.

“It’s terrorism,” I said.

That’s when I knew my son was not going to grow up in a world at “the end of history.”

That’s when I stopped joking about it and determined we would name him “George Washington Browne.”

And that’s when the idea came into my mind that I should return to America and get serious about studying journalism.

Where were you on 9/11/2001?

* See http://history1900s.about.com/od/1940s/a/empirecrash.htm