‘What human beings are capable of when everything else falls away’: As the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001 approaches, Lansing native reflects on what she learned about humanity after witnessing events from that fateful day

by Julie Berg-Raymond

In a famous line from Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Color Purple - which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, a character writes her sister a letter, in which she observes: “Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.”
Approaching the 25th anniversary of the events of what is colloquially known as “9/11” - when, on September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists associated with the extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes to launch coordinated suicide attacks in the United States - millions of people are remembering where they were and what they were doing when they saw, live, via television coverage, the airplanes hit the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

As with other momentous events in the life of this country - the Kennedy assassination, the first moon landing - it seems, to many people who bore even distant, televised witness to the events of 9/11, that the intervening 25 years have passed very quickly, indeed.

This is a story about what one woman - Alene Keenan, a native daughter of Lansing - witnessed in person that day, and what she learned about humanity’s capacity for goodness, even in the darkest of times. Keenan told her story during a presentation at The Works, in downtown Lansing, Thursday, August 27. Titled “One Extraordinary Day: What 9/11 Revealed About Humanity,” the presentation was attended by more than 30 people who listened, as Keenan told her story with a mix of gentle, often self-deprecating, humor, compassion, and admiration for what, she said, “I saw people become when others needed them.”

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