As the country approaches the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a new personal essay published by The Daily Wire is framing the day not through the familiar litany of timestamps and death tolls, but through the sudden collapse of one young American’s belief that she was safe.
The piece, written by Ellie Bufkin, director of communications at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, describes a deeply ordinary morning that ended in a world she no longer recognized. Bufkin was 18 and freshly out of high school when the attacks unfolded, working a summer job at Best Buy and preparing for her first training shift.
Her morning, she writes, began far from any dorm or classroom. She was wearing the same clothes as the night before, sitting in a recliner in a barn loft on a friend’s property outside Frederick, Maryland, still feeling the effects of a night of drinking with a close-knit group of friends her mother had joined after moving the family from Baltimore amid a bitter divorce.
It was there, at 8:55 a.m., that a landline phone rang. A friend attending Towson University was on the other end, asking if Bufkin was watching the news. “Some idiot just flew into the World Trade Center in New York,” Bufkin recalls the friend saying.
She didn’t recognize the building’s name. She and her friends, she admits, had been more focused on the death of singer Aaliyah in a plane crash days earlier — and on the idea that a plane hitting a New York tower was somehow a smaller story.
What followed, she writes, was a slow, confusing descent into catastrophe. She flipped on a television and found smoky images from Lower Manhattan. Minutes later, she watched a second plane strike the second tower live. Her friend on the other end of the line, she believes, tried to impress on her that someone was intentionally trying to blow up New York. But as suburban teenagers, she says, they saw New York as a distant, nearly mythical place and could not grasp the scale of what was happening there.
A Father’s Voice, and the Collapse of Certainty
The tone of the essay shifts when Bufkin describes a call from her father to her Nokia cellphone — a device with a pink faceplate and glowing antenna — who urgently asked where she was and where her brother was, warning that cell towers might be overwhelmed. “We are under attack,” she remembers him saying. “This is very serious.”
At the time, she dismissed his fear as overreaction. But reports of other incidents poured in — rumors of fires on the National Mall, confusion about the Pentagon, and unconfirmed reports about attacks in other cities. No one knew how many planes had been hijacked or how many more were coming, she writes. In a barn loft in rural Maryland, it felt as though the sky might be full of hijacked aircraft.
Even the collapse of the twin towers, she reflects, did not register as the singular, heart-stopping moment it now symbolizes in retrospectives. Something larger had already shattered: the conviction that the America she grew up in — safe, free, impenetrable — would always exist. That childlike confidence, she writes, would never be permitted to return.
The essay acknowledges the grief of families who lost parents, children, spouses, siblings, and friends in the attacks, and Bufkin is careful to note she did not lose anyone she loved that day. What she lost was the certainty that another ordinary Tuesday would always come.
In the 25 years since, Bufkin writes, she has learned that it was not luck that prevented a repeat of September 11 — it was vigilance, advocacy, strategy, policy, alliances, and war. She now devotes her professional life to studying the men who carried out the attacks, their beliefs, and the threats that remain. That path, she suggests, may have found her as much as she found it.
Bufkin also directs a note of envy toward Americans too young to remember the attacks. They cannot know what it felt like to possess an almost absurd confidence in the nation’s own security before 9:03 that morning. Yet the world that confidence produced is gone, and the piece ends not with a policy argument but with an image of a teenager in a barn, unaware of what was about to happen — and the wish, just for a moment, to give her back the world she thought she lived in.
The essay joins a broader wave of 25th-anniversary reflections that are grappling with how the attacks reshaped American life, from airport security to the wars that followed. But its focus stays personal: what it meant for one ordinary young woman to watch the sky turn hostile on a clear Tuesday morning, and to spend the next quarter-century knowing that any perfect morning could turn into hell on earth.
Bufkin’s account, published on The Daily Wire, is unusual in its insistence that the most important casualty of that morning may not have been a building or a government policy, but a belief — one that many Americans did not know they held until it was taken from them.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-last-ordinary-morning-in-yesterdays-world