Editor's Note: Following the attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001, the current Editor in Chief Andrew Ivers wrote a commentary on his own experience on that day. The following is the original commentary that was published on the front page of ​​Prep News Volume 66 Issue 3. 

On Tuesday morning, I walked into my second period classroom—for Latin IV with Mark Tychonievich—worrying about the previous night's translation homework, which I had yet to complete. The television's corner was brighter than usual: I was taken aback. As we filed in, Tychonievich told us to sit down. This was the day's lesson. You want to go to school? Tychonievich asked in a realistic tone his friends know well. This is it. The twin towers of the World Trade Center looked like smoke stacks, as Tychonievich later observed. 

We were watching because there was nothing to do which was more important, yet I think very few of us felt or knew the magnitude of the situation. About ten minutes later, the south tower collapsed. I excused myself and made a brief search of the upper halls, trying to find any students or teachers upon whom I could impart the information. They needed to know. I could honestly think of nothing else besides relating the situation to anyone I could. I found Latin teacher Mary Lee McConaghy conversing with a sole student in her classroom. 

As I entered her room, I told myself she had surely heard something; she had not. I spit out the information: hijacked planes…the Pentagon…the World Trade Center towers…one already fell…Then I said a word which has stood by itself on countless lips the last few days: "its…” I could not finish the thought. I finally said "ridiculous," then immediately realized my understatement. Soon we were back in Tychonievich's room. The second tower fell. The Pentagon was on fire. Lower Manhattan was a cloudy pile of rubble. Another attacking plane might be 25 minutes from Washington. All I could think of was precedent. I realized there was none. 

I thought about the way the Great Depression reconfigured the mentality of one or two generations directly and changed the basics of the U.S. economic and federal banking system. I thought of the way World War II elevated the U.S. to the peak of a global pedestal, again, changing the American mentality. Tychonievich was right in assessing the situation's gravity: things happened on Tuesday that had never happened in our nation's history. I realized I was living through a moment of before and after. Some of America's most prominent establishments—from industrial Manhattan to the view Americans have of their security—had been "All changed, changed utterly,” as Yeats said in his poem "Easter 1916." He was talking about the execution of 16 Irish nationals by English officers after an uprising in Dublin which transformed the men from questionable rebels into heroes and invoked fervent support for the Nationalist cause among the Irish. He knew the world after that action would be completely new and different. And so it is now.

As I watched the events unfold, I did not think of the casualties. I will admit that. The sheer awe the acts against the country inspired was what mainly drove my emotions on Tuesday. Now we live in a different world: the world after. Bush lived like a ghost on the evening news; political and military headlines on old newspapers in my room seemed completely unimportant. The gravity of the perceived and the palpable repercussions alone are too much for me to think of; such an utter change is too much to comprehend.