Ten Years On

I've seen a big increase in people who think they know shit about the Middle East and Islam and what we should do to combat etc etc.

I've seen a small increase in people who actually do know shit about the topic.

I've seen a big increase in my blood pressure.

 

What I remember most about that day, was looking at my then 14 year old stepson and my 4 year old twin boys and realizing that their lives had fundamentally been changed forever in a way much like Pearl Harbor had for my parents and JFK being shot had done for me. Ten years later, I realize that their lives have been changed in an even greater way than I had ever thought. It makes me very sad.

 

This use to bug me a little also until I very recently had conversation with the GF's 14 y/o daughter about Sept 11th. I was shocked to learn that she knew basically nothing of the tragic events. Had no clue how many people had died, couldn't tell you what state the 4th plane crashed in etc etc. I think any attack on American soil is a huge deal and should be remembered just as we do for Pearl Harbor.


FOCUS: After the numbness had passed, what I really remember in the following weeks was the solidarity of the U.S. Just for the brief time there was no Rep & Dem, no political agendas, just the citizens of the U.S. coming together. With the rift in Washington these days, I really don't know if that would happen right now.




Probably already too many focuses on this thread, but I've always wondered what people from other nations thought of that attacks. Any Canadians, Australians, Brits etc care to chime in?

 

[quote="GTE]

Probably already too many focuses on this thread, but I've always wondered what people from other nations thought of that attacks. Any Canadians, Australians, Brits etc care to chime in?[/quote]

It was a shock. I remember watching it all happen on the news and being speechless, the distance felt irrelevant as if this could happen to NY, it could happen anywhere.

I would say it didn't just solidify the US but reached far further, especially the UK as even at the time it felt that however the US forces responds, the UK will be first in line to help out without (much) question.

 

I remember it like yesterday. I was hungover, and my friend/roommate booted in my bedroom dorr in the morning before going to work:

"One of the World Trade Centre towers is on fire."

HOLY SHIT I scrambled for the TV. Not even a minute after watching, CRACK the other plane hit the tower. We jumped back from television, confused, jaded, scared, angry. What the fuck is going on? I thought I wa still asleep for a mintue. It was sop surreal to see something like this live. I mean, I figured it was America being attacked, but WHO? And WHY? I stayed in front of CNN the entire day, getting queazy when the towers fell. I could not believe it. These buildings, which I used to draw and be obsessed with as a kid (I was an architecture nut even as a young boy) were.....gone into a vast smoking hole in the earth. And when you knock something like that down, two proud pillars on the very shore of the world's most super-civilized city, it lets you know that ANYBODY is vulnerable. It was a horrible, horrible feeling.

Then, the circus began. The still never-ending circus of hunting, blame-shifting, unnecessary paranoia and fearmonger profiting. It changed everything in the worst possible way and the people responsible for it accomplished EXACTLY what they wanted. This was my generation's Kennedy Assasination, only much much worse and unfortunetly much more memorable.

 

A lot of things. That day was surreal.

I was in college in Stephenville, Newfoundland. I had an early class and then I was free for an hour or two. When the class ended, I stumbled to my floor's lounge to watch TV for a bit. I rarely did that in the morning. I was alone as I flicked the TV on and the first plane had just hit. Within what felt like seconds, I watched the second hit. At the time, I had no goddamn idea what I was seeing, but I was glued to the TV for the rest of the day. I started flagging down random people as they walked by.

I mentioned Stephenville because of the Stephenville International Airport. Within hours, planes were landing there and one of the places that these displaced people were being taken was my college residence. Some of us volunteered to give our rooms up and some of us volunteered to have extra roommates. It was bizarre to watch all of these students, teachers and travelers wandering around not really knowing what to do. The next 2 or 3 days were chaotic.

I did get one genuinely good laugh out of the situation, though. One of my friends had volunteered his room because he didn't have a roommate at the time. He did so before he even knew where he'd sleep that night, too, so good for him. Anyway... The joke he made was something to the effect of:

"I don't get it... A plane flies into a building thousands of miles away and I have to sleep in the stairwell."

 

I was just about to leave for class when our neighbours came tearing over to our apartment and told us to turn on CNN. It didn't seem real. We watched for a few minutes and then saw the second plane hit. We sat in stunned silence until someone said something about getting to class. We had a forensic science class that morning and there was a note on the door that the prof had been called out to NYC to assist the recovery/identification efforts.

I have relatives that live in New York, one of whom is a photographer. He won a World Press Award for the pictures he took that day. When the first plane hit, he went out onto his rooftop with his camera and captured the second tower attack.

Spoiler

I just remember the panic, being so far away, knowing that there were people I knew who were (albeit indirectly) affected by what was happening, not being able to contact them, not knowing if they were okay. Like so many others, we had everyone from our dorm crowded into one room watching what was happening, some people crying, others trying desperately to get through on phone lines that wouldn't connect. That feeling of complete and utter helplessness in the face of tragedy made us all realize that we weren't these invincible kids any more. We all grew up a lot that day.

 

Ah September 11, 2001. Starting at around 7 pm on the 10th I began to get drunk. That way when midnight rolled around I'd be good and hammered when my birthday started. Well about 12 shitty Southpaw beers later in the course of two hours, I wound up puking and passing out. I got a frantic call from my girlfriend at the time the next morning who implored me to go to the TV as we were under attack. I drunkenly staggered to the living room and turned on the TV, the first image I saw that day was the second plane striking the World Trade Center. I was in such of combination of hungover and awe that I thought the TV was on HBO and I was watching a movie, until I tried changing the channel and realized the truth. I woke my roommate up and dragged him out there and we both watched with out jaws on the floor. Then I had to go to work, where I watched the towers collapse live on the internet and ran home and spent my birthday like many Americans did that day, glued to any and every news channel I could find.

I remember the unity of America like never before, every house had a flag waving from it, and all of a sudden it was like we were all neighbors for the briefest of times. One thing that has stuck with me over the years is an image that was forwarded to me via email, and breaks my heart every time I look at it this time of year. This is the image.

 

I had never felt "American" the way I did that day. I was at work, building house packs for contractors, and had gone in for coffee. I was bullshitting with the boys when the first plane hit, every screen in the building playing it over and over.

Coby yelled at the screen that "there was no way that was an accident." We were just a bunch of kids, staring at the second plane, trying to grasp what it meant.

I went to check on my family, my mother said it was no big deal, the end was coming.

I still get fucking chills.

 

Focus: My brother-in-law worked at the World Financial Center (attached to one of the twin towers by a walkway). After no word from him, I picked the Mrsanthropic up at work and we went home to wait things out with the in-laws (he was fine, as it turned out). Standing outside on the front porch, it was almost surreal what a gorgeous day it was that day - sunny, barely a cloud in the sky, a light gentle breeze, about 70. And quiet. All planes were grounded, and few if any cars went by. The silence was amazing. Our neighborhood was beautiful and peaceful - and 50 miles away thousands of people were dying or had died, and things would never be quite the same.

Alt focus: Other than the McVeigh nut and the pathetic attempt to blow up the towers in '93, terrorism was something that happened somewhere else - Ireland, Israel, India, Egypt. But not here. We were strong and free and remarkably safe. Since 2001, at least a dozen would be terrorists have have been arrested in failed attempts, and terroristic shootings have occurred at military bases (Fort Hood). We have been forced to accept that terrorism can and will happen in our country, to our friends and neighbors.

 

Focus: My wife and I had been dating only a few weeks and the day before we had returned from a very memorable trip to Port Jervis, NY so I could meet her sister. She had come to pick me up for work (we worked together at a cardiology practice on Long Island) and told me that she heard on 1010 WINS that a plane had hit one of the towers, so we turned the TV on. I remember thinking it was very unlikely it was an accident. We left to go to work and while listening to the radio on the way we heard that a SECOND plane had hit. We both knew instantly it was not an accident and it was very much a "holy shit" moment. It was even worse when we got to work.

One of the ladies we worked with has a son who was a pilot for Southwest Airlines, he was in the air while this was all going on and she was absolutely hysterical. I'll never forget that woman's terror when she heard that the planes had been hijacked and that they were killing the crews. Another woman we worked with had a son who was working construction just blocks away and he actually saw both planes hit the towers. She was hysterical also. The fear in the office that day from everyone was so palpable, you could almost touch it. Once the reports of the plane hitting the Pentagon stared, the doctors shut the office down and sent everyone home. And let me tell you, those greedy bastards didn't do that for anything.

What struck me most about the whole thing was that in the days after, there was no air traffic, and LI has about half a million airports, small ones, medium size ones, large ones, it's not just LaGuardia and Kennedy. The skies above Long Island were never so quite except for occasionally when you could distinctly hear what were obviously fighter jets patrolling very very high up. The words eerie and surreal never had more meaning.

The other thing that struck me was something one of my co-workers told me several months after. Her husband is a firefighter and they had gone to a wedding before the attacks. At their table were about 8 other firefighters and of those, only her husband and one other guy who were at that table were still alive. That blew my mind.

So fuck anyone who says we shouldn't wave the flag and say never forget. Really, fuck you.

 

I was stationed at Fort Lewis, WA. I was driving into work when the first reports started coming in. At first it was "a single engined plane has hit the WTC". As someone who was in the US Military from 1996-2009, I can tell you that it changed my life and my outlook forever. The places that I went, the things that I've seen, and the friends that I made and buried, all are a direct result of that day.

Jesus. I plan on sleeping in that day, and acting as if it is the same as any other, except I will hang an American flag outside BabyMomma's house(I spend the weekends there and she has a flagpole), and for a brief moment reflect on how 19 men can change the world. It still is an emotional moment for me every year when it comes.

Fack.....

 

I was going to Biology class when we were stopped and herded into the auditorium. I have no idea what the hell was going on, and to be honest, my initial reaction was to hope that whatever it was would go on long enough to obscure the fact that I hadn't finished (or started) my Bio homework.

File that one under tragic understatement.

The next two hours are a teary blur of classmates trying to navigate the jammed phone lines to reach parents who worked in the towers. The administration was trying to keep some semblance of order regarding the phone situation, and I was surprised when I got to make a couple calls, until somebody reminded me that I traveled daily through the World Trade Center. (In retrospect, I was a couple blocks away and wouldn't have been in any immediate danger, but nobody knew anything about what was going on).

For a while after that, New York was a surreal place to be. People made a deliberate effort to be kind, to be invested in the goings-on of strangers, to be invested in what it meant to be American. I wondered if it would be permanent, but it lasted maybe two weeks, I'd say, before being replaced briefly with suspicion and racism, then a worried interest in whatever "Afghanistan" was, and finally the narcissistic cynicism that has ferried the city lo these many years.

 

I was in my 11th grade Biology class when we knew something was wrong. The teachers were instructed to not turn on the TVs--under severe penalty, too. There were plenty of kids whose parents or family members communted from my town into NYC every day. Until I got home, I didn't know it wasn't an accident.

When I came home, the first thing I saw when I walked in the door was a replay of the plane hitting the first tower, and then the second moments later. It just didn't feel real.

It really struck me what our world was going to be like when I flew down to Florida to visit my grandparents 3 weeks later. Guys holding M4's, dogs everywhere, a hell of a lot more security and longer waiting times. In retrospect, it was probably the safest time to fly, as weird as that may seem.

 

I was one of those nerdy kids who did announcements in the morning in my school - that morning had been an assembly that I had read off the announcements during, and was heading back to class when we all got sent back for another assembly.

They took a good 40 minutes to get the assembly rolling - I'm not sure the timing but I think it has to do with either the timing of the second plane hitting or the buildings collapsing. The 40 minutes we spent generally not knowing what was up, though some people s aid things like "The Sears Tower got hit" and "the empire state building was on fire"

My school was grade 7 and 8 only, and we spent most of the day being stupid kids acting as if we knew about the world, talking about who could have done this (Plenty blamed, of all people, the Russians), and some (me) were scared that it might have been some precursor if they'd tried to take the pentagon out. We were scared what would happen to the US more as a followup to this etc than actually appreciating the tragedy.

 

I was on my way back to the house from dropping my girls off at school and pre-school and had NPR on in the truck. They were reporting that a plane had crashed into one of the towers, but didn't have any specifics beyond that. My initial thought was that it was a small, personal aircraft. When I got home, I turned on CNN to see the smoke billowing from the first tower in just utter disbelief. I tried calling my sister's cellphone since she commuted through the WTC, but there was no answer. I found out later she had a dental appointment that morning and hadn't trekked into the city.

What stands out most in my mind is sitting there watching the television and then seeing the second aircraft making the turn and realizing, "Holy shit, they're going to take out the second tower." Those few seconds of knowing you're about to witness an unthinkable, horrific event, and the only thing you can do is watch it happen.

I grew up right across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, and watched the WTC being built during my childhood. When I went to NY for a wedding in 2009, it was my first trip back post-9/11 and as we were driving from the airport, I got my first live glimpse of the NY skyline. The absence of the towers literally got me choked up.

 

I'll show you a joke, brother: