There are disasters and then there are disasters, apparently.
(don’t shoot me, trying to be funny)
Sailboat
I am still at the same place I was that sad sad day. Someone mentioned that a plane hit the WTC. I assumed it was a small plane and I wondered how much damage it would cause. We have a TV in the lunchroom and I wandered over to see the horror that is was a large jet that hit. A minute or two later, I watch in far worse horror as the second jet hit and I started yelling that this was no mishap, this was a terrorist attack. I also was saying something about how the towers have tens of thousands of people in them, tens of thousands! I am not sure what I did after that. But about an hour later I headed for home. I stopped at the blood bank on the way thinking there would be a need for blood.
I assumed I lost one of my cousins and I was worried about my Aunt. My cousin was home sick that day, still recovering from pneumonia. The best time to be seriously sick ever I would say. My Aunt took til 6pm that night to walk far enough North to get a ride back to her apartment in the North Bronx. We were worried all day about her.
I eventually found out my niece (an EMT at the time) was standing by the NJ side of the Lincoln Tunnel to go in and help with the rescue. They never brought her group over.
I felt like I should rejoin the Navy and do something, I felt impotent. I really let it get to me badly for the next few weeks. I was one of those people just glued to 24 hr news stations. My wife told me I was just dour and depressed and like an automaton
I remember driving home from the Blood Bank and seeing that long dark cloud over Sandy Hook on that otherwise blue sky day.
I was lucky, we lost no one in our family and even our friends had near misses at worst. One woman had to run to another office near Central Park first for a diskette she needed that afternoon, so she wasn’t on the 80th floor like she would have been.
Jim
With all the glurge about pictures showing the hands of God or people who survived tornadoes because their Chihuahua had a dream or whatever, it’s nice to occasionally get an interesting forwarded email that’s actually true.
Photo of the USS New York and the Snopes article that legitimizes it. The USS New York is a 684 foot amphibious assault craft built using 7.5 tons of steel from the World Trade Center.
I was unemployed at the time. A recruiter had called me a few days before because he had a hot lead, and I was excited about it. We were to nail down our plans for an interview on the 11th. He kept calling and leaving messages, which I never answered. I wondered how he could be conducting business as usual with all that was going on. It seemed so unimportant in the larger scheme of things.
And I had just started working on a theatre production. Our first rehearsal was the night before. I was wondering if we should have cancelled that night’s rehearsal. Apparently I was the only one that felt that way. My lovely assistant conducted it that night while I stayed home. Being that she grew up in Bosnia, a little light terrorism was no big deal to her.
I just saw footage of some of the people who jumped in one of the videos I watched. 
My evil side would prefer it to be seven years later with Osama bin Laden’s head on a pike in the middle of ground zero, but most days I try to be a better person than that.
Heh… I was watching one of the videos, and got distracted by 2 things. A bird flying by in one shot, and a couple of traffic lights cycling from yellow to red.
The world really didn’t stop. It just seemed like it did.
I don’t like thinking about it much. Threads on 9-11 always end up weirding me out when I recall that Day.
Before I started reading this thread, I promised myself that this time I would make it through this thread without crying or getting bothered by the images/stories and I wouldn’t click the links, I’d just read the thread and go on to the next one.
I still am crying a little as I hit submit.
They say never forget, and I don’t think I will. I wasn’t there, but I still remember watching it on TV in school, and I still remember where I was that Day.
A woman came into my dad’s shop that morning ranting about it and we thought she was off her rocker. When she said “oh and they attacked the Pentagon too” that was the icing, I knew she was nuts. A while later my dad turned on the radio and it was the most horrid, rivetting piece of radio reportage I have ever heard. A journalist in a building quite near the WTC was describing what was happening, including the people jumping off. The horror and terror in his voice was so haunting.
Never forgive.
Never forget.
Ah, hell no. You dig an oubliette at ground zero and put him in that. He would be depending on the kindness of New Yorkers for his food and water.
Oh, yeah. Build a pissoir around it as well.
Not much anger. Oddly, I’m in Washington, D.C. today. Looking at the Capitol. An icon, moving to behold.
Time dulls the brilliance of the shock of the event but if we are thinking feeling humans, there are not enough decades we will live on this planet that will erase the memories. Explains the irritability and lousy dreams recently.
It is not more acceptable to bomb the living hell out of another country and then hear about it on the evening news, with numbers of “civilian losses”.
Violence begats violence. Just a weariness. It is an exceedingly twisted world we live in.
Cartooniverse
Before 9-11, I was unfortunately already predisposed to anxiety about catastrophic world devastation. I already had PTSD. I already was oversensitive to the suffering of others. I didn’t feel safe to begin with.
On 9-11 I was a freshman in my very first week of college at the University of Michigan, sitting in Spanish class without a clue. My roommate and roughly 12% of my dorm-mates were from New York City. I was woefully uninformed about the world at the time–I didn’t even know where the World Trade Center was located. I learned pretty damn fast. My roommate was in hysterics and all I could think to do was call my Mom. Nothing seemed to matter but other people. I embraced so many strangers that day.
Though I didn’t lose anyone that day, 9-11 changed everything for me. I saw the world in a whole new way after that – I began to care about politics and educate myself about foreign policy. People talk of ‘‘post-911 America.’’ I talk of ‘‘post 9-11’’ me. But that development was almost entirely intellectual. I have kept, for the most part, as much emotional distance as possible.
Until now. Life is so bizarre.
7 years later, to the day, I am at work training for a job in the Wall St. District. I never planned to be here, life just made it happen. Every morning for at least the next year I will take a train marked ‘‘WTC’’ to Ground Zero and walk by this gaping hole to work. What is most startling is the immensity and the obviousness of this chasm. You can’t avoid it, and every time you see it, you can’t help the feelings of horror from flooding in. The people this happened to were people like me, who happened to work here. It’s so senseless. It is so, so easy to imagine the terror and chaos, people jumping to their deaths, the towers collapsing. New Yorkers are not shy about talking about that day, and the fact that they are still scared shitless. It is always right there in the back of my mind, and I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to pass it before I stop thinking about that awful, horrible day.
I wasn’t there. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be there.
But I’m here now.
ETA: MSNBC is running 2 hours unedited of the footage. Nooooo.
I had to sign something today, and the person requesting it of me said, “Remember, it’s 9/11/08! Three people so far have dated it 9/11/01.” It will be a long time, if ever, before September 11 is not anchored in the year 2001.
In honor of the day, I bought some bacon salt for my friend serving in Iraq.
One of the things that got to me is that it kept piling on. One plane hit, then the other, then the Pentagon, then Tower 2 fell, then Tower 1, then Flight 93 crashed. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. And you didn’t know when it was going to stop.
The reporters also struck me. They were speechless and didn’t know how to react/report. I remember seeing a shot at Fox News, and they had locked the cameras down and the floor director and other crew were standing in the shot, watching the TV that’s available to the on-air crew. I know Peter Jennings thought just one side of the tower fell, and the reporter was screaming at him that the whole thing came down, and Peter was speechless.
Petty differences just melted away, that day. We were all Americans.
For an all-too-brief time afterwards we were all Americans. It’s a shame that events and low politics diminished that feeling.
The first line of the NY Times story on 9/12/2001 was “It kept getting worse.”
Sportscaster Werner Wolfe was watching the WTC from his window and talking to shock jock Don Imus on his cell phone. When he said “Oh My God, the tower just collapse,” Imus was totally mysterified and asked “You mean the antenna fell off?” Wolfe replied “No, the whole tower just collapsed. It is not there anymore. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I actually found out about the attacks from Imus in the Morning, because that what was on my clock radio when it went off at 9:32 that morning. I have absolutely zero interesting things to add about what happened, so I’ll try to keep this short.
On the actual day, I was scared for my father for a while because he worked in Manhattan, but in point of fact he wasn’t anywhere near the trade center. He got home early in the afternoon, which I’d figured was going to be impossible. One of our neighbors across the street got home a little later and there was a lot of white ash on his jacket. That was absolutely spooky.
I think I’m comfortable with my emotions by male standards, but I do get confused by the fact that I’ve never managed to cry over what happened. I think it’s actually too enormous and I end up taking that detached-from-humanity pose.
Last night my girlfriend stumbled onto the History Channel’s airing of tons of ‘found’ documentary footage of the attacks. I never would have normally watched that; I’ve avoided the anniversary events and coverage at all costs. But once you see that, it’s hard to convince yourself to change the channel and I wound up watching that with her for about two hours, seeing a lot of things I hadn’t seen before and going through the experience in a different way. It was intensely awful. I’m glad I watched in the general way I’m glad for most intense experiences I have, even the ones I don’t enjoy for a second, but I’m still sorting through a lot of it.
I was probably one of the first Dopers to get on a plane after the attacks because I had to go back to college nine days later. That was very strange. The plane was almost empty- actually almost the whole airport was empty. I don’t think I’ll ever see it get nearly that quiet again. Mostly that’s ok.
Anybody else have many memories of 9/11/02, by the way? Windiest day I can ever remember, and I went to college near Chicago. It knocked down a thick tree across the street from my family’s house, which was scarily appropriate and also a very eerie reminder nobody needed.
Was that 102 Minutes that Changed the World? I taped it last night because Ivylad hates watching Sept 11 stuff…he says it just pisses him off. I also have the documentary by the French brothers…they were doing a documentary on rookie NY firefighters and have the only footage of the first plane hitting.
It’s like watching Schindler’s List. It may not be pleasant, but we need to remember history, especially the ugly stuff.