Politics
The Only People Calmer Than Bush on 9/11 Were the Six-Year-Olds Watching Him
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
Twenty-four years later, the former students of Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, are doing press. This is where we are as a country.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush sat in a second-grade reading circle at Booker Elementary, listening to children sound out words from a book called "My Pet Goat," when his chief of staff Andrew Card leaned down and whispered that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and that America was under attack. Bush nodded, said nothing, and continued sitting. For approximately seven minutes. With the book. While the children waited.
The children, who were six and seven years old and had just learned what a compound sentence was, handled it better.
"You could see it on his face," recalled one former student, now an adult with a mortgage and presumably a better poker face than the leader of the free world had that morning. "We all kind of knew something was wrong."
This is the part that deserves a moment of genuine reflection: a room full of first-graders, who believed in Santa Claus and had been alive for fewer years than a standard car lease, looked at the President of the United States and immediately understood that the situation was bad. The President of the United States, meanwhile, continued to monitor a story about a goat.
Sam Daniels, another former student, told reporters that the class had been excited about the presidential visit and had practiced their reading. "We wanted to do a good job," he said. They did. One of them, reportedly, read the word "kite" correctly on the first try. The administration's performance was more mixed.
Bush's press secretary at the time, Ari Fleischer, has said in subsequent years that the president chose to stay in the room to avoid causing panic. This is a reasonable explanation. It is also the same logic a person uses when they notice their car is on fire and decide to finish their podcast episode before pulling over.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was being moved to a secure location at that exact moment and would spend the next several hours making decisions from a bunker, was not in the classroom and did not have to maintain a reading-circle face. Historians have noted this is probably for the best.
Bush himself addressed the moment in his 2010 memoir "Decision Points," writing that he had not wanted to "rattle" the children. The children, for the record, have now been interviewed by multiple outlets and remember being rattled by him.
"He looked scared," said one former student, who was polite enough to add that she understood, in retrospect, that it must have been a very hard morning. She was six. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. She is still giving adults the benefit of the doubt. Some things from second grade stay with you.
The reunion of press attention around the Booker Elementary students arrives at a moment when the country has spent two decades arguing about what happened after those seven minutes ended: the wars, the intelligence failures, the color-coded threat levels that turned out to mean nothing, the airport security apparatus that still makes a retired schoolteacher remove her shoes in Akron.
The students, to their credit, are not making any of those arguments. They are simply reporting what they saw: a man in a suit, sitting very still, in a plastic chair designed for a seven-year-old, holding a book about a goat, while the world changed outside.
The goat, for its part, has never commented.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/US/students-president-george-bush-911-reflect-day-face/story?id=136308678