KEALAKEKUA — About 800 students at Konawaena High School Wednesday gathered at the school’s football field to remember the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks almost 15 years ago. ADVERTISING KEALAKEKUA — About 800 students at Konawaena High School Wednesday gathered at
KEALAKEKUA — About 800 students at Konawaena High School Wednesday gathered at the school’s football field to remember the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks almost 15 years ago.
For many of the students too young to remember when planes flew into the World Trade Center, Wednesday’s ceremony was a chance to learn about the ambush and reflect on those who perished.
“We can feel what people who actually saw it felt,” said Cadet Lt. Col Riley Nakamura, 16, a member of the JROTC at Konawaena, which organized the event.
Ret. Maj. John Naki, the school’s senior army instructor, said the ceremony was a chance for all of the school’s students to keep the country’s past alive, rather than leave it as something students read about in a book.
“They’re just learning from what we can tell them,” he said.
In addition, it was an opportunity to teach students about sacrifice and those made by first responders.
“One of the biggest things you can do is sacrifice yourself for others,” he said.
The ceremony included a speech from Mayor-elect Harry Kim as well as a moment of silence and ended with a playing of taps for the students.
Kim told the crowd that on Sept. 11, 2001, he was awoken by a phone call at 4 a.m.
“I was thinking it was some kind of crank call,” he told the crowd.
A woman on the other end of the line told Kim, who was also mayor of Hawaii at the time, to turn on his television, telling him “we will await your guidance” before ending the call.
Kim said he turned on his television set and saw what was unfolding.
“A sight that you will never, ever forget,” he said of watching the planes crash into the towers, and the towers crumbling to the ground.
“I think every person in the United States, at the time about 300 million people, felt the stunning silence of fear,” he said.
“Our lives changed from that day on,” he said.
Cadet Capt. Julia Lim, 14, said the attacks defined her generation as one that grew up in a country changed by the strikes in New York and Washington, D.C.
“It united us,” she said. “It made us all persevere.”
However, Naki said, not all students feel the same way.
“It’s hard,” he said. “Some kids might not care about it.”
Fifteen-year-old Cadet Maj. Justin Rojas said the ceremony served to educate those too young to remember as well as a chance for remembrance by those who do.
But in a world changed by those attacks, Kim encouraged them to see how they can make a difference in their own community.
“You should know how very special this place is,” he told the crowd. “You should know how very different and special you are.”
Kim also challenged students to take better care of their community than his own generation did.
“We, in our generation, did not do a good job for you,” he said. “I’m asking you to be better than us.”
Because without that community, what he called a “cosmopolitan” community of mixed races, “you have nothing,” he said.
“There’s gonna be a lot of forces that try to change you,” he said. “Don’t let them change you to the negative.”
Naki said he hopes that having a memorial ceremony every year will make the lesson stick even as 2001 moves further into the past.
“We need to keep the memory alive,” he said.
