Just like every other year, I remember trying to reassure myself: “Maeglin and Pucette don’t live that close. They don’t work that close. They’ll be okay. Jeremy’s in Brooklyn. Nen is in Queens.”
And talking to Nen as he watched the smoke roll in and the towers fall. And, later, trying to figure out how to get him home.
Then the Sikh man was dragged off a train at the Providence station just downtown from me. And then the sheer enormity of it all hit and it wasn’t just about my friends anymore.
I did. Take the namecalling to The Pit. I was addressing more than any one Doper, but the attitude shared by several in here.
But hey, feel free to read my post for outrage instead of comprehension.
I too long for the days when I felt safer. When I could go wander in my own suburban neighborhood and not have to keep looking over my shoulder.
Where when I was a kid I could walk to the playground or park by myself and be gone for hours at a time.
Did 9/11 change that? No.
American crime in general changed that.
The real threats to me and my family these days are kids with guns, gangs, child predators, people with road rage, sex offenders, etc.
Fear of terrorists? Not so much.
Fear of american criminals? Real fear and concern.
Planes in NY hit the Twin Towers killing many hundreds of miles away from me once six years ago.
Two men shot and killed a guy and his girlfriend in their apartment complex parking lot and took their car less than a mile away from me (something like this happens about twice a year in my town).
Which one would scare you more and change your everyday habits?
I was working in a building across from Dulles Airport that day. My window looked out across a highway to the large, white domes of the aircraft fuel tank farm only a couple of hundred feet away. One of the planes involved had actually taken off from Dulles.
We were, of course, hypnotized. Before the second plane hit, no one really knew what was up, but the absolute instant I saw that second plane fly into the TV frame I knew it was no accident.
The thing I remember most clearly is the sense that a series of things were happening, one after the other. One tower hit, then a second. Then the Pentagon. Then rumors of another aircraft, and of other attacks. Then one tower fell. Then the other. Then we got reports of that missing aircraft. It very much felt like a series of blows, more effective than if it had happened all at once. We were definitely wondering what would happen next.
Remember no one knew where the President and Vice President were. Offical platitudes and confusion were all we had. Rudy in New York was our lifeline, the only government person standing up and talking frankly – he even admitted (many times) that he didn’t know things. We were starved for someone to talk to us.
One of the local rumors was that the nearby smallish town of Leesburg’s federal air traffic control center had been hit by a plane. Leesburg has history, and is fairly sophisticated, and Loudoun County hass been growing more modern by leaps and bounds, but they still think of themselves as rural small-town folks, which makes what I’ll say next kind of extraordinary.
Some news organization finally realized that Loudoun County’s local officials might be able to check out the rumors that the air traffic control center had been destroyed. The Loudoun County Sheriff’s office sent a patrol car around and eyeballed the place. Then the sheriff himself was interviewed on the radio. He informed the nation that the air traffic control center was intact, and added that there was no sign of further attack in his jurisdiction, as far as he could tell.
No President, no Vice President, no Congress, no generals…just the grim or panicky news personalities…and the Loudoun County Sheriff – other than Giuliani, the only calm, matter-of-fact voice I heard that day.
Maybe he should have been put in charge of the whole response. A little bit of laid-back, routine, gunbelt-hitchin’-up rural law enforcement might have been better than the “war on terror.”
Sailboat
Heh. Now I do work that close. Lightning won’t strike twice in the same place, right?
Nice way to completely twist my words around. :rolleyes:
Maybe, just MAYBE, I think it’s better to simply spend a quiet day in remembrance of those that died, perhaps, instead of ourselves, perhaps? Or instead of remembering how they died, let’s remember how they lived?
jsgoddess-are you shitting me? People are actually doing this? :eek:
“Those that don’t remember the past are condemmned to repeat it.”
Let’s all just forget about 9/11. Let’s let airport screening go back to how it was on that day. When it gets repeated, all the peoiple that found it fun will have some more laughs.
I will remember 9/11 each and every September 11th that I am alive. I will tell every person I know to never forget the horror of that day.
I don’t want to forget, either. But I could stand to get September 11th back as a day that I can actually do stuff and not have to watch the towers go down over and over again via slow-motion replay. Doing that ONCE, staring at the TV screen in gaping shock, wondering if this was some kind of sick mockudrama or nightmare, was enough, thankyouverymuch.
But why do I, Jane Citizen and Clearly Not a Terrorist, still have to take my shoes (SHOES! for crying out loud) off when I’m passing through the security checkpoint when it’s fairly obvious that the TSA screener is just giving my plane ticket a cursory glance?
Why do I, Jane Citizen and Clearly Not a Terrorist, have to jump through so many hoops to get a passport when people can waltz through our Northern and Southern borders without even being checked, which are apparently being guarded on an “honor system”?
Why do I, Jane Citizen and Clearly Not a Terrorist, am not even allowed to legally carry a firearm in some states when criminals are robbing people (or worse) in broad daylight?
Do I feel safer? Not when I’m traveling. Do I care? Not really. If it’s my time to go, it’s my time.
That reminds me, I totally need to leave my usernames and passwords with someone…
Jane Citizen, can you please tell me what traits you have that would make any stranger look at you and see that you are Clearly Not a Terrorist?
Richard Colvine Reid was treated as if he were Clearly Not a Terrorist when he tried to blow up an airplane with explosives hidden in his shoes (SHOES! for crying out loud)
What does having ceremonies and watching videos and weeping and wailing have to do with not forgetting?
If you only remember on the anniversary, what good does the memory do you? If you remember the rest of the time, what good does the anniversary do you?
Have the security measures made us safer? I don’t feel safer. Of course, I never felt unsafe to begin with.
If there are lessons to be learned by 9/11 shouldn’t we have internalized them by now?
It’s good to know that I wasn’t the only one that felt like 9/11/07 was just another day. No one mentioned it to me. I didn’t even see anything about it on TV or hear anything on the radio. Outside of Nava’s pitting, I didn’t open any threads on the Dope that mentioned it (even in passing) either.
On the 12th, I heard someone mention that the town board meeting the day before had held a moment of silence for the victims of 9/11. Since then, nothing else has been said by anyone I know.
My world is back to normal. Of course, I feel things “went back to normal” around October of 2001. My life and the things I do hasn’t changed much, if at all, because of 9/11. It was sad all those people died, but it didn’t change anything.
True, and then there’s Richard Jewell who earned the unwavering loathing and vitriol of the entire world for bombing Centennial Olympic Park in 1996.
Undeservedly.
But that didn’t matter for a long time, to a lot of people.
Isn’t there a middle ground? Does remembering the victims and the tragedy automatically equal weeping and wailing and not letting go of an allegedly fetishistic attachment to tragedy?
I find it important for myself to remember the day and reflect upon the people who dies. I have an acquaintance who lost her husband (and the father of their young son) and some other friends who lost loved ones—that’s as “close” as it gets to me, but it would feel wrong for me to say, “I wasn’t involved”, because I feel like the whole country was involved.
I did not, however, attend any memorials or watch any TV specials or anything like that. No one forced me or anyone else to, as far as I know, although some folks are acting like they can’t escape it. I amnaged to and I’m pretty sure all you have to do is elect not to watch anything.
I thought so. Now, after this thread and the pit thread, I’m not so sure.
I’ve got zero objectivity since I was there. Regardless, I want to throw in two cents and try to answer that question.
Awful things happen every day to people. No doubt. How many people died in car accidents on September 11th, 2001? How many died of cancer, of a heart attack? Every loss a cause for profound grieving. Does one heal and move on but remember a lost one? Of course. That’s just healthy.
The enormity of the attacks moved people who were not directly affected in ways that I suspect people had not been moved since the morning of the 1993 WTC Bombing, or perhaps Pearl Harbor. Our innate sense of security within our borders was compromised. That sure freaked a lotta people out.
The line between fetishistic obsession and legitimate PTSD is so fine that I nor anyone else should be allowed to say exactly where it sits.
People who ran for their lives down the stairs may or may not have recovered. People 3,000 miles away may or may not have recovered.
Is it less legitimate an upset because you were removed from the physical site? Some might say hell yeah, some might say bullshit- people are entitled to their reactions.
Any psychiatrists or psychologists wanna chime in on what constitutes an unhealthy obsession or fetishistic hyper-focus on this event?