Voices of the Past
Jordan: We are sitting with Kimberly Busch, about to discuss the time period between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. Uhm, Mrs. Busch if you wouldn’t mind, do you give consent for me to record this conversation and use it for my own paper and then put it into the historical archives of Clarkson University?
Kimberly: I do!
Jordan: Alrighty, thank you! How are you doing today?
Kimberly: Good!
Jordan: Yes, good. Uhm, so we are going to be talking about sensitive material, it’s ok for you to stop at any point, uhm, and we’re going to try to get a gauge of how you felt back then. So I’m going to ask you to kind of forget everything that you have read since then, forget all of the politics that have happened afterwards and really bring yourself back to that time period, and I’m going to try to help you with that and so my first question is going to be what were you doing in, like, the 2000, 2001 era? What were you-
Kimberly: -oh, just general…?
Jordan: Just in general.
Kimberly: Ok. Well, July 1st of 2000 I got married. And I just moved up to the North Country, I’m originally from near Utica, New York and I was starting my first year teaching at Canton, in September.
Jordan: And what did you teach?
Kimberly: Music.
Jordan: Music. Were you doing chorus then? Or just general music education?
Kimberly: Yep, I had 7, grade 7 through 12, chorus, general music and one section of kindergarten music. Which almost killed me. (Laughter)
Jordan: And what was your husband doing at the time?
Kimberly: Uh, he was working at the Crane School of Music as a piano professor and music history and literature professor.
Jordan: Alright. And, uhm, so, Bush was set to be inaugurated that- what was it? When does he- he gets inaugurated in 2001. How did you feel about the elections? That just so recently happened.
Kimberly: Ah, let me see. Let me put myself back there. We had gone to Italy and Greece that August before the September 11th attacks, and I remember being over in Greece and the people there were not happy that Bush had been elected president. And the Greeks were very eager to offer their opinions about, you know, what they thought and we would often times find ourselves clarifying that not everybody in the country had voted for him and that we were not all in favor and that personally we were not happy that he was president, and we didn’t feel that he won it in a fair way because of the whole “dangling chads” on the voting ballots and that it was more of a court case than an election. And we, yeah, we thought it was a bad move all around that he was going to be president.
Jordan: Fair enough. Uhm, so… could you actually describe to me the day of 9/11.
Kimberly: Yeah. I was teaching… Let’s see, I think 7th grade general music was coming in the door, and I had just heard from the kids that these buildings had been bombed and that airplanes had flown into the world trade centers and they were collapsing and it was “cool” and “awesome” …and my blood went cold. Because I thought, very likely, hundreds of innocent people had lost their lives. At that point in time terrorism isn’t something you thought about. When I was growing up, terrorism happened in Ireland. Terrorism happened in the Middle East. But it didn’t really happen. I mean there was the Oklahoma City Bombing and that was called terrorism, but it wasn’t like that was the normal thing to happen in this country. So, I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I thought there had been some accident. That there had been some airplane that, you know, had gone off course for some reason and had flown into this building and that hundreds of people had died and all the kids could see was they were visualizing it as some blockbuster movie. And they were just like “Aww, that’s so cool!”
