By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
September 7, 2026
The day began in an ordinary fashion.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I drove my children to daycare. They were still small, not yet school age, but my daughter, the eldest, liked to talk on car trips, however short they might be.
Once I’d dropped her and her brother off, I used the 20-minute drive to my office to make and return calls. I worked at what was then the Indiana Civil Liberties Union as the executive director in those days.
I’d been out of town—in New York City, in fact—the previous week, so I had a crowded calendar of meetings waiting for me. I’d walked by the World Trade Center—the ACLU’s national office was in the financial district—at one point and marveled at how those two towers seemed to be a city unto themselves.
When I got to my office, I had paperwork to finish before I headed to the first of my meetings.
One of my colleagues stepped into my office.
“Did you hear about the World Trade Center?” he asked.
Focused on the documents before me that I needed to read and sign, I mumbled that I hadn’t.
“A plane flew into one of the towers,” he said.
“Did the pilot have a heart attack?” I remember asking—still innocent.
My colleague shrugged his shoulders and walked out.
I went back to my paperwork.
A couple of minutes later, my colleague was back.
“A second plane just flew into the other tower,” he said.
I dropped my pen and slumped back in my chair.
“We’re at war,” I said, both to him and to myself.
I called my wife. We had family in New York.
She, too, had just heard about the attacks. She was going to try to reach her parents and siblings in Manhattan.
She called back a few minutes later to say she couldn’t reach anyone. The lines and circuits were all overloaded.
She said she was going to pick up the kids from daycare and bring them home. It wasn’t that she feared for their safety. She just wanted to have them close.
I told her I’d be home as soon as I could.
Most of the meetings I had scheduled fell through. People canceled as businesses closed.
Only one appointment remained, a lunch meeting at a restaurant in a strip mall on Indianapolis’ north side. When I showed up, all the other shops were closed.
I was meeting with a consultant we’d used. We were the only people in the restaurant.
We talked about business for a few minutes. Then she asked me where I thought things would go from here.
I shook my head and said I didn’t know, but that I thought it would take a lot of years to come back from this.
By then, we knew that the terrorists who had attacked us had hijacked our own planes. They had taken our own tools and turned them into weapons.
We couldn’t trust our own systems.
It would be hard to feel safe again.
After lunch, I headed home.
My wife had heard from her family in New York. Everyone was safe, but her aging parents had walked more than 50 blocks home and then climbed 15 flights of stairs because the public transit systems weren’t running and the power was off.
My wife asked when I next had to go to New York for work.
Oct. 11, I said.
She asked if I could cancel the trip.
I shrugged my shoulders.
After a while, it became clear that the news coverage couldn’t provide any fresh information, but the networks couldn’t break away because all the ads had been pulled. No one wanted to try to sell things during a disaster.
We decided to pop in a series of “Little Bear” videos. We sat there, taking turns holding each of our young children and each other while the world outside closed itself in shock.
Our children are grown up now, adults living their lives on the East Coast.
They don’t remember 9/11 itself. They don’t remember sitting with two parents who feared what the future held for the young.
They do remember Little Bear, though.
Those stories of a little bear discovering the wonders of the world comfort them like a childhood blanket, a symbol of a kinder, more innocent time.
A time that’s long gone.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
