It was a normal Tuesday morning.

The smell of hours-old Sheetz coffee wafted from the Styrofoam cup at my desk in the newsroom at the Standard-Speaker in Hazleton. Staffers were talking and joking, the norm in the early part of any regular day working under the pressure of a deadline.

What we didn’t realize on that morning 25 years ago today was that the pressure was about to crank up beyond anything anyone who lived through it could imagine.

Someone yelled to turn on the TV.

Minutes earlier, a jet crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

We watched, wondering how something like that could happen and thinking it was just a horrible accident.

About 20 minutes later, just after 9 a.m., a second jet angled across the clear, blue sky and sliced into the walls of the South Tower.

And at that moment the newsroom stopped — eyes glued to the TV screen.

But the terror didn’t.

We learned that another aircraft had crashed into the Pentagon and yet another was being hijacked in the skies of western Pennsylvania.

What we didn’t know was that plane, United Flight 93, had passed just to our south, over Monroe, Carbon and Schuylkill counties.

Heroic passengers attempted to regain control of the aircraft, which crashed in a field in Somerset County shortly after 10 o’clock.

Just minutes before, the South Tower collapsed. The North Tower followed, its twisted steel and concrete sending a wave of smoke and dust to cover all things in lower Manhattan.

Terrified people ran away, struggling to see and breathe as they fled.

In the same instant first responders — firefighters and police who would become heroes — ran toward the danger to save others.

Somewhere in between, our world stopped and tilted.

For everyone — wherever they were — the events of that morning turned into a dividing line.

There was the world before 9/11.

And the world after.

They were events that defined a generation.

My parents had Pearl Harbor and D-Day.

I’m old enough to recall the solemn days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, in addition to the events of 9/11.

The image of Kennedy’s young son saluting as the caisson carrying his father’s flag-draped casket wheeled its way to Arlington sticks in my mind. I was just three years older than John-John at the time, and I guess it was just because of my age, I couldn’t fully understand what and why it happened.

But then, decades later came the horror of watching as the second plane hit the South Tower and the chaos in our nation’s capitol as another aircraft plunged into the Pentagon.

And the final words of Todd Beamer, a passenger aboard Flight 93 who flew over Carbon County, before helping to force the plane down in a field in Somerset County, “Let’s roll.”

Those are things many of us remember. We were old enough and had experienced enough in our lives to realize that somehow, it would never be the same.

Twenty-five years later, the changes the terrorist attacks brought feel almost ordinary because we’ve lived with them for so long.

We realize those changes weren’t inevitable. They were choices and reactions — and consequences — that altered life in our country in ways we’re still dealing with. The attacks of that day sparked nearly 20 years of conflict in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. American soldiers died or were wounded. What happened during those wars still shapes the news.

For many in our area, those wars meant deployments, homecomings and losses. Their effects are still carried by local veterans who returned in a way different from when they left. Many families learned to live absent a member.

The changes 9/11 brought transformed the way we moved around. On every flight, there were shoes off, belts off and liquids checked.

Identifications were checked as surveillance became more widespread. Intelligence agencies grew as the government expanded its power.

In the days that followed the attack, we had a sense of unity, a togetherness that helped get us through those times.

Were we afraid? Sure.

That fear somehow turned into suspicion and started a wedge that splits our nation apart even today.

The attacks didn’t cause it, but they made it get here faster.

Since then, we’ve become more willing to see threats everywhere.

Race, war, immigration and religion suddenly became topics where people took sides. Those discussions changed the way we feel and talk about our politics and progress.

Before 9/11, there was a sense of being safe from a global incident. In the days and years after, it appears we’ve become more vulnerable.

How we talk about things like safety and patriotism are different.

How we travel or gather or raise our kids changed. Strangers somehow became more “strange.”

Normal took on a whole new meaning.

The kids in school today weren’t alive back then. Many of their parents were probably teenagers or younger.

They’ve grown up in a different world from the one prior to the attacks.

They don’t remember the day, but they live in the world it created.

Need proof? Just look up.

From wherever you are, you’re under the same sky that links us to the events of 9/11.

In our area, it’s a reminder that 25 years ago we were part of that same sky on a day when history passed over us unannounced.

Today, a milestone anniversary, we might ask ourselves how to move forward.

We can learn from our responses and how we might adapt them in the future.

We can try to recapture the unity we had after the attacks. It was real and showed us what we can do when we come together.

The past doesn’t tell us what to do next, but like the sky above us, it’s a reminder.

Even unexpected places can be part of history.

ED SOCHA | tneditor@tnonline.com

Ed Socha is a retired newspaper editor with more than 45 years’ experience in community journalism.

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.