WAYNE COUNTY, Mich. – Christopher Belch has been teaching history, civic, and social studies at Canton High School for nearly 20 years. He’s found a unique way to help his students understand just how surreal and devastating Sept. 11 was.
“I think a lot of times when we go through history, we think about names and dates of famous people, but to me, history is about how ordinary people experienced the world,” Belch said in his classroom on Friday morning. “To me, history is about how ordinary people experienced the world, is about how ordinary people did extraordinary things.”
“It’s telling the stories of the individuals, telling the stories of the people who were there, and the people who experienced it from outside of New York City,” he added. “9/11 pretty much every five years, especially now, it becomes more pertinent to think about,” he said.
An estimated one-third of the U.S. population is too young to have experienced – or have any real recollection – of Sept. 11, 2001.
The day is to them what Pearl Harbor was to Baby Boomers, or what the Kennedy Assassination is to Generation X and older Millennials. Belch, who was a college student in 2001, took a different approach to teaching his students about 9/11.
“The students had to interview somebody who was born 1986 or earlier, so they would have been, whoever they were interviewing would have been at least high school age around Sept. 11,” he said. “It may have been one person that they interviewed, I guarantee you, they’re gonna go home and they’re gonna ask everybody in their family more questions after today.”
‘It was like a wake-up call…’
Gavin Lombardi was born in 2010, nearly nine years after the attacks. The Canton High School junior, however, does have a deep interest in 9/11.
“I just see it as our country united,” Lombardi said. “Especially when George W. Bush, threw out the first pitch (in 2001), or the documentary about when Osama bin Laden was killed (in 2012), and all the Phillies and Mets fans came together.
“My mom told me it was like a wake-up call,” he said. “I feel like it united people too.”
Lombardi has been to the 9/11 memorials and understands the importance of the day, even as many of the events are as jarring to him as they were to those of us who experienced it in real time.
“I went on a DC trip, and I went to see Flight 93,” he said. “They had all the audio recordings of people’s last calls. It was really sad.
“I feel like it’s safer [today] because hopefully an attack like that never happens again because they call the hidden police on airplanes,” he added. “It’s just safer now for our generation.”
‘They wouldn’t talk to him the way they would…’
For Nabiha Mirza, her perspective is different.
Mirza, a 17-year-old Senior at Canton High School, is Muslim and wears a hijab.
Her father owned a restaurant in Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. He told her that how he was treated from that day forward completely changed.
“He could just tell by the way they were acting,” she said. “My dad’s very talkative, he’ll talk to people, he likes building friendships with people.”
“They would still come to his restaurant, but they wouldn’t talk to him the way they would before,” she said. “He could tell by their faces, the whispers that they would do behind his back.”
She said that it still lingers with him a quarter-century later, but she also feels like there’s good in everyone, even with the bigotry that her father and other American Muslims experienced.
“There’s good and bad in everything,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that you make every Muslim out to be a bad person.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Christian or Jewish or whatever you are,” she said. “You can’t just label the whole group bad or horrible.”
Belch has a lot more faith in this generation of kids that some of the harsh lessons and not embrace the bigotry that spurred from 9/11.
“I think about where we’ve been as a nation since then,” Belch said. “Going through some difficult times as a nation, but also uniting as a nation, and overcoming much of the hate that came out of Sept. 11.”
“I feel like we need to remember that at the end of the day, like, no matter what happens, no matter what attacks happen, we live in this country,” Mirza said. “Everybody needs to be there for each other.”