No need to remind anybody what date is approaching.
Please refer to Nostalgia for old threads?which I started 08-26-2010, 06:58 AM and which led this morning to this post there:
It’s difficult to imagine that this issue hasn’t been addressed before, and I’m not wanting to replow old ground. But if we can point to threads, posts, even, that help to revisit what Dopers saw, heard, felt and said about that day, maybe this thread could be a resource for revisiting the time.
Pointing to threads with similar motivation would be a good start.
But it is my personal goal to locate the first POST (in whatever thread) that pins down when SDMB began to discuss the events in real time.
Your help in this search is hereby solicited. Other ideas on the issue are welcomed.
Mods, please put this thread wherever is best. I’m choosing ATMB as a best guess.
There ought to be a way with some software to look through threads with older start dates for mention of various keywords that would possibly point to news of the 9/11 attacks, but lacking that ability myself, I have gone brute force through the sequential URL numbers starting with
and have concluded that if this is not the first then it’s close to the first dealing directly with the events of the day.
======================================================= World Trade Center Plane Crash
09-11-2001, 08:03 AM
Living Dead Girl
Using the Wiki timeline and converting to CDT, this thread was started close to 15 minutes from the time of the first news reports of the first plane’s crash.
And if the Dopers who posted in that thread can bring their memories to bear on other threads that day, it would be helpful. They are:
Thanks for the great contributions, HardlySanguine and Eutychus. Since it was nearly two years later before I began participating at SDMB, I’ve had to get a sense of how things were then by reading threads and articles by people who were there. I can only imagine the mood that day. Even now I see skylines of NYC in movies and photos and such that include the towers and I can’t stop the tears.
My memories are exactly in this thread, starting with post #2.
I was wrong about the aircraft, first because of a typo, and second because my later correction was wrong. But it was an event-in-progress, so details were few.
Thanks, Johnny L.A. – I’ve been reading it ever since I posted the link. My heart is pounding here almost nine years later. You folks were amazing to get that much info and that much emotion expressed here in that thread.
As for details being a bit off, I’m astounded you got so many of them right!
You’re welcome. You can see in the linked thread in the OP that it just developed organically from a query about “To Kill A Mockingbird”! I don’t mean to make more of that than there is, but it’s a little odd in its own way.
My thanks go to those who have followed up with posts of some stunning quality. Maybe by the day’s return we can have a real memorial built.
We can only hope that that day’s horror won’t return during our lifetimes. I was born three days before Pearl Harbor, but don’t remember a thing about it. All I know of it has been through others’ eyes. In a way, my awareness of the real damage to our country has come in much the same way. These threads are vivid reminders.
She was okay. I think she arrived at work after the first plane but before the second. She might be the one whose co-worker was hit by falling debris from the second impact, but vix herself was unhurt, albeit jobless.
Of course it’s better to merely lose your job, rather than your life or even a limb. But when you think about it, 9/11 was the ultimate downsizing. Not just office workers, but WotW staff, parking attendants, security, custodial staff, retail workers in the shopping center…Thousands of people showed up for work that day, work that abruptly no longer existed.
Started by Ultrafilter on the day of the attacks. Weirdly prescient given the conspiracy nonsense that arose after the attacks. I’m glad to see the consensus answer was yes.
There’s also a GQ thread, started earlier in 2001, which discusses the feasibility of landing every plane in the US at once. Bumped on 9/11 or shortly thereafter.