Written by Kimberly Lemus & Zoe Vaughn
Margaret Bauman, works in the Multicultural Life and Diversity Office and has been a resident of the Cortland area for many years, woke up on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, with no idea how the country would change.
Bauman was working as a corporate billing manager in Hudson, Ohio at the time. When the accident happened, her phone was filled with calls, messages, and voicemails.
She called her mother in confusion and learned that tragedy had struck. She lived in a little town called Medina, between Cleveland and Akron, where planes usually flew overhead.
That night, the town was silent.
“The silence was worse than anything else because we didn’t know what was actually happening,” she said.
People had no direction about what to do with themselves and little reassurance in the future of the country.
“I went to the grocery store, and there was nothing. There was nothing in the store,” Bauman said. “Do you remember during COVID? It was apocalyptic, but [this was] worse, because people were literally like ramming their carts into people like, like society was almost breaking down.”
The first few days following the attacks seemed to be the scariest for Bauman, considering no one was hearing the truth about the state of emergency they were in.
“There were news reports that they had poisoned our water and that there were more people other than the people that were on the planes, acting out various acts of terrorism on the country,” Bauman remembers.
Bauman also remembers the state of health of everyone after the tragedy. Weeks have passed since the disaster, but people were still living in constant fear.
“There was a gentleman that had a turban and my knee jerked,” Bauman said. “We were all so deeply misinformed about people’s religions and all those things. Everything that was on the news was just veryinflammatory for people of a certain religion and skin color.”
She moved back to New York after the attacks because she discovered her sister had pancreatic cancer. Many of her memories of that time revolve around illness and death, which she feels are still prominent issues we are surrounded by.
Over the last 24 years, so many challenges have been overcome from Bauman’s perspective. In her lifetime she has endured more than enough deadly circumstances that she feels like it has been enough.
“It’s like you almost become numb to it, to the circumstances,” she said. “And then now, in what circumstances our country is in, which is definitely under attack from within, it’s so depressing.”
September 11, 2001, is a date society has acknowledged and paid tribute to for 24 years. That day was not just a small event in the past, but it is something that reshaped Bauman’s perspective of life in all the years since then.