I now bring a radio to work so I won’t have to listen to other people’s radios to get news. Or music.
I began regular contact with an ex-girlfriend who lived in Manhattan at the time. It’s a much longer story than what I’m making it out to be, but I don’t feel like telling the whole thing.
I get tired of people, from the government to the people in this thread, being irrationally afraid of airplanes. Do you jump at the sound of big trucks too? How about container ships, that carry a much bigger potential for something bad?
Hmm… I guess like plnnr and WeRSauron, I’ve become a lot more cynical and jaded too.
Not a whole lot has changed.
I don’t think I had any prior illusions about the (un)likelihood of terrorist attacks against or within the “civilized west”, and if anything I was surprised that no tinfoil wearing band had detonated a do-it-yourself Uranium A-bomb in NY or London yet.
Just yesterday I was cutting up cardboard boxes with a box cutter. I can’t hold a box cutter in hand without thinking of 9/11. And I thought of 9/11 when the lights went out and wondered momentarily if it were Phase II.
My sense of patriotism did a nice little parabolic trajectory, rising after 9/11, leveling off during Afghanistan at a pretty high level, and plummeting back with the escalating chest-beating w/regards to possible invasion of Iraq.
I miss having the towers there, although they were actually pretty boxy and utilitarian, and I sometimes find myself having highly inappropriate and blackly irreverent moments of musing about which ugly-ass buildings I’d most like them to knock down next if there’s a next time (I suppose it would be really rude to paint a target on the side of Trump @ 47th/1st? How about PanAm / MetLife?). I winced at most of the designs for the memorial/replacement, too.
I didn’t personally know anyone who worked in the towers and neither I nor any of my closest friends lost jobs in the economic downturn that’s been with us since.
Ah but do you remain vigilant still for another terrorist attack? And how do you feel about our gov’t’s programs to stop it? And faith in that system?
It didn’t take long, that day, for me to learn that two women who were former co-workers (and friends) of mine were lost in the attack. They had both worked for Canter Fitzgerald.
My one vivid memory was something that I’m totally ashamed of. On my way to the store, I saw an “Arab-looking” woman walking down the street with her two young children. I immediately felt an amazing upswelling of anger at them, thinking to myself “How *dare *they show their faces, after what those bastards have done!”
I had never in my life felt any negativity toward anyone, based on their ethnicity. In fact, over the years, I’ve had friends and acquaintances of all different types, including believers in Islam, and I’ve always accepted people as individuals. I had to mentally shake myself, and remind myself that that woman and her kids were as innocent as I was, and it wasn’t going to be an easy time for them.
So I learned a very important lesson that day, about how superficial our civilized veneer is, and how the seeds of intolerance and fear are not very far beneath the surface.
I didn’t know anyone personally who was lost or injured in the attacks, which is why I couldn’t really figure out the little bout of depression (not clinical, just . . . lingering sadness, when otherwise things in my usually-happy life were sailing along as usual) I had a couple of weeks later.
Since then I don’t know that much has changed for me in the way of increased awareness/caution/fear, etc.
But (and I was talking to Skip about this last night) I find that I’m far less stoic since then. As a child, I was extremely sensitive, and was so often moved to tears (sometimes just out of sympathy for someone else, who was NOT crying over whatever his/her plight may have been) that my older sister threatened to have my tear ducts removed.
I had no idea what that meant–but I also had no idea that she couldn’t really do that to me (I was a kid, and she was 9 years older; I thought she was omnipotent), so I taught myself to curb the emotional tear-fests.
Since 9/11, however, I have become an emotional blubberpuss again. It seems like I have a certain (and very delicate) emotional “set point”, and any emotion more intense than that, whether happy, sad, frustrated, etc., just makes the tears come.
(Case in point: On New Year’s Day, 2002, I teared up when I found Odwalla juices–an addiction I developed when I lived in California from 1996-98, and heretofore unavailable in my area–in my local supermarket.)
So yeah. I’m much more of a cryer since 9/11, but while it’s a little disturbing to me, it also makes me less disturbing to other people, who used to comment with concern on my stoic nature.
In short, I think I’m considered far more human now.
I didn’t lose anyone directly in the disaster, but many threads of my life got twisted that day. My friend’s mom’s house started on fire at 11:00 that day.
She lives in NJ.
No one came to put out the fire.
My friend’s dad was in NY on vacation. He overslept, and missed his reservation to Windows on the World that morning. So he decided to go out on the town for the day instead.
He’s an ER Trauma physician for St. Louis. And the St. Louis disaster coordinator.
He survived. All because his alarm didn’t go off.
On of my co-workers found out his sister, brother-in-law and 2 kids were on the plane that crashed in PA.
They were going to surprise his parents for their anniversary.
That being said…
I guess many of the things that people mentioned above didn’t kick in for me like they have for others. I still fly (just came home last night, as a matter of fact), and I don’t have any resentment towards Muslims or Arabs or any other group of people.
What changed for me was all little things that I notice that I never did before.
I live near a major airport, and had never paid attention to the aircraft overhead.
Until the NIGHT of 9/11.
Hearing the fighter aircraft roar overhead, instead of the quieter sound of the 747’s disturbed me far more than the images on TV.
I pay more attention to police/fire/EMT’s than before. I consider it a privilege to buy them a cup of coffee or pick up the tab for lunch. Never would have done that prior to 9/11! 
I make sure to give my wife & children a kiss before leaving for work, or going out for the day. That wasn’t essential prior to watching the towers fall.
Stories about firefighters cause me to tear up.
I don’t know why. Police stories don’t. Other disasters don’t. No idea why firefighters do.
And I’ve become both more patriotic, and more cynical. (Odd combination, isn’t it?) I feel that if the terrorists were trying to destroy our way of life, we MUST continue to defy them and live as free people.
But I’m certain that the draconian changes of the government after 9/11 (the Patriot Act, and the imprisoning of people without a trial, for example) will do more to destroy our way of life than the planes of 9/11.
The evening of September 10, 2001 my wife and I took off for a vacation in Spain. We landed in Madrid around 9:00 AM Madrid time (3:00 AM NYC time). We did a little sightseeing and then crashed at our hotel around 2:00 (8:00 NYC). You see where I’m going with this…
After a three hour nap, we awoke to find the world had changed. The attacked took place while we were sleeping. We had CNN and the BBC in our hotel room, so could follow the aftermath of the attacks.
Neither one of us speaks much Spanish, and that evening and the next day whenever we overheard someone speaking in English, we would gravitate toward that person just to commiserate.
It took us several days before we could think about trying to enjoy our vacation. It was a very weird time to be out of the country!
Are you only worried about their right to free speech? Why not worry about their right to stay alive?
hijack to GD territory:
Terrorists will eventually have nuke weapons, thanks to North Korea and Iran, and the West’s unwillingness to stop them. The rights guarranteed by the First Ammendment are nice, but they will be useless if we don’t first guarrantee our right to life. We need military intelligence as much as (or more?) than we need civil rights.
Yes, it’s a slippery slope, but the world has changed.It used to be that our physical existence was guarranteed, and we only needed to worry about our social/political freedoms. Now, our physical existence is hanging on a thread. What good is it to have freedom of assembly to demonstrate at the White House in Washington,if nobody can get to Washington? If terrorists close all the hub airports in America --how will we celebrate our freedom of assembly?
Homeland Security is as important as the Bill of Rights–without one we won’t have the other.
It’s sad.
And scary.
But it’s the reality.
(sorry 'bout the hijack)Phlosphr:
No, not really. No more so than before it occurred, I mean.
Some useful tightening in some places, I guess, but a lot of things they’ve done fit in the range between gross infringements on personal liberties and annoying inconveniences. I’m not impressed.
Low-flying planes overhead make me feel edgy.
I was immediately suspicious about sabatoge (and quite scared) when I heard the power outage wasn’t just in our town.
I’m a sucker for any firefighter soliciting donations for almost any cause. Our salvation army had firefighters in fire gear ringing the bells these last two holidays. I nearly tripped myself running to put money in.
I take a lot more joy in new babies. My friends had a baby right after 9/11, and it was such a “life goes on” affirmation. I’ve noticed that feeling hasn’t really gone away.
I worry more about the cost of us not understanding the world and having the world not understand us. Consequently, news about conflict bothers me. Sometimes I stop listening to the news for weeks at a time.
I make a bigger effort to smile and express kindness to the muslims around here–I feel like I have to make up for the people who let bigotry and ignorant intolerance overrule their rationality.
I think about civility and community more, and crave it. I don’t always practice it, but I do better than I used to. I guess this is because a few months after 9/11 I saw a guy get really irate and scream at a postal employee over a policy and I thought “Can we not be more nice to each other in this country? So what if you can’t write a check; it’s such a small thing.” I think people were gentler with one another for a time after 9/11, and I desperately hated to see it end.
I don’t think I feel very good about people challenging each other to justify their feelings in this thread. This doesn’t seem like the place to start picking on each other.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was just beginning my last year of law school at Harvard, just across the river from Boston. Around 2 a.m. that morning, I spoke with my long-distance boyfriend on the telephone, and I fell asleep during the conversation. In the morning, sometime between 8 and 9 a.m. Eastern time, he called me while he drove into work, just to say hi and finish our conversation. Though he usually listened to NPR on the radio during his drive, he had it turned off that morning.
I went back to sleep after we hung up. My classes weren’t until later that day.
At around 9:45, my best law school buddy, Jamie, called me and asked in an urgent, stricken tone, “Are you watching the news?” She woke me up, but I was out of bed in an instant. My cable TV wasn’t hooked up yet, and I remember frantically rummaging around, trying to hook it up. I was in my pajamas and wearing my glasses, and listening to her give me bulletins on the phone while I did this.
The whole time, she kept telling me that the planes were small planes, and that it sounded like everyone got evacuated. And I remember thinking that Jamie is from Alaska, and has no concept of how long it takes to evacuate huge buildings like that. I grew up in the New York area. Dad used to work on Wall Street and I’d heard stories about how long it took to evacuate skyscrapers during emergencies. In my heart of hearts, I knew that thousands of people were going to die.
I couldn’t get the TV to work, so I hung up with her, quickly threw on some clothes–not paying attention to what I put on–and ran down to the student union. I remember the frantic feeling of not being able to get dressed fast enough.
And I stood there, at the bottom of the handicapped access ramp to the lower level where the TVs were, back up against the railing, staring with my mouth agape as I watched the towers fall with dozens of my fellow students. Since many of them either from New York and Washington, or were going to work there after graduation, people were running in and out of the room to make cell phone calls. They came back in with snippets of news.
Reports that the planes originated in Boston struck fear in my heart. I remember thinking that of all the potential terrorist targets in the Boston area, Harvard University was a pretty likely one.
I didn’t give a moment’s thought to classes until I saw one of my professors come into the union and start watching the television with us. The news that classes were cancelled trickled in, but I remembered thinking that it was ridiculous–who would go to class on a day like this anyway?
Around noon, when there was nothing else to see and the news coverage became nothing more than an endless repeat of the images of the towers falling, I left the union and went back to my room.
I’m not really sure what I did with the rest of the afternoon, but I do remember listening to NPR constantly until my cable was hooked up, and after that, I watched CNN compulsively for three or four months.
I remember feeling compelled to seek out the most horrifying images of the day–those that they didn’t show on television. Images of people hanging out the windows of the WTC, and of people jumping to their deaths. I remember crying on the telephone with my boyfriend that night, talking about how gut-wrenching the idea of that sort of absolute desperation was for me: the choice between burning to death or jumping 100 stories to your death.
I walked around feeling like I was going to throw up for days. It was a long time before I found out if many of my old friends were safe.
For me, Sept. 11 stands as a line of demarcation. I’m 26. I came of age in the era of Bill Clinton–a prosperous era, when well-paying jobs were easy to come by for me and all my friends, when it seemed like things were going so well that we had to invent scandals that seemed like a bad joke (did the President get a BJ in the Oval Office or not? should he be impeached for it?)
I began my working life in the post-Sept. 11 era. Jobs are hard to come by even for my very smart, very well-educated friends. Terrorism, war, and threats to civil liberties have drastically changed the country we live in. Kids today are coming of age in an era of fear, recession, violence, and paranoia.
For the first time in my life, I feel that I am really living history. One hundred years from now, my great-grandkids will read about this time and wonder what daily life was like for us. Sept. 11 has affected every area of life in a way no other event of my time has. I don’t know what moniker this era will have (think the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Vietnam era) but it’s going to be studied and picked apart by our descendants.
I do know that for most of my friends and their families, all sorts of things have gone wrong since Sept. 11, and very little has gone right. It’s probably largely a matter of perception, but I do believe that the stresses of a bad economy and scary world events have helped to erode the happiness of most peoples’ daily lives.
So did I. I was at a rally yesterday listening to students hash it out about racial profiling, homeland security, Bush, Iraq etc…etc… As a professor I usually keep my political views out of such arena’s however, as I was the man who wrote the essay that is in our magazine regarding September 11. I was asked to say a few words. Here is an abreviated snippet of my thoughts.
I am hearing so much anger today from a lot of you. Not unjustified I may add. But it is what you choose to do with that anger that will make you into the person you are going to become. Anger made 19 or 20 men kill thousands of innocent people with in 2 hours almost 2 years ago. There are more civil ways in this world to accomplish what you want. The world recognizes hatred. Even in their own countries hatred was recognized. Do not let the resentment for your government, country, religious orientation breed with in you…
It can make you do ugly things as we have seen, as is burned in our minds eye forever.
I said quite a bit more, but you get my drift. This will remain with us forever.
9/11 was my sister’s second day at work in a building right near the WTC. She was on the phone with her fiance when she heard a plane flying very close and looked up to see it crash into the first building. She screamed and ran for her office. Inside the office, people were panicking and running about. As she’d just started this job, she was unsure about emergency procedure and simply got together with some brand-new co-workers and left the building. As they were scurrying away the second plane hit. My sister ran with three women she barely knew, seeing body parts and pieces of plane hitting the ground around them. Her office was pretty much destroyed, and instead of relocating to other offices in the New York area, she (and a number of other new employees) decided to quit the job and move back to Connecticut with her fiance, who is now her husband.
I can’t imagine what things would have been like for me and my family had my sister not been okay that day. I was thankful my father called me immediately after my sister talked to him (which ended up being sometime in the morning CST, what with the time difference to Hawai’i from NY) and I knew she was fine. Shaken and freaking out, but physically fine. I turned on the television to find a lot of people weren’t fine, and that not everyone was as lucky as I was, knowing my family was safe.
I didn’t feel angry then, and I don’t feel angry now. Sad, yes. A little bit scared, certainly. But I still fly; I have to, in order to see my family. I haven’t made any changes like putting together an emergency kit or an emergency plan. Actually, my work gave us an emergency kit for the office, so I do have one. I carry water wherever I go. I do have more of a sense of “this might be the last time you talk to/see this person”; and I think that’s positively affected how I try to treat other people in my life.
I saved a lot of magazines from that week or so, and like others in this thread will probably leaf through them this weekend. Especially the New Yorker: the cover was completely black, with a darker silhouette of the Twin Towers.
What changed for me?
I’m having the most god-awful dreams. Every time I go into NYC I get unnerved a little bit.
Life’s more precious, and I know that’s REALLY cliche’, but it is. Any person, at any moment, can be taken out of the equation of your life. My life. That was a fact before, but post-9/11 it is that much more painfully apparent.
I turned 40 the following summer and was given not one but TWO large coffee-table type books on the attack. Full of photos. It was painful to go through them, but I felt it was probably a good thing to do so. Hiding from the images and trying to make it go away is futile. Wallowing in it is equally non-productive, at least to me. I don’t know what the proper mechanism is to heal from this, but I thought that looking through the books wasn’t a bad move. Nothing about this is supposed to be easy, but driving from NY to Washington, D.C. today gave me a lot of time to listen to N.P.R.
As I heard the reports on the latest exchanges of lethal violence in Israel and the surrounding environs, I am once again reminded that our horror is not unique or special. The act is especially horrific and immense, but there is this slow madness to the world that was exemplified by 9/11- just as it was again yesterday and overnight last night in the Middle East.
We kill with a numbing relentless repetition that devalues every life on the planet.
Cartooniverse
Yeah. Let’s cave in and let the terrorists know that they can push us around any time they want and we’ll automatically do what they want. So a big pile-o-Jews get killed? Big deal! We didn’t care in the 1930s, why care now? Let’s just do what Tom Metzger demanded the USA do in response to the attack.
A good idea. It is also utterly impossible. There are no truly neutral parties in that situation.
Absolutely a great idea. Anyone who extends or perpetuates our dependence on foreign petroleum is a traitor and should suffer the traitor’s fate. Get the US off the oil standard, and share the technology with the rest of the world for free.
HAH! You obviously have never worked with a UN program. HAH! I have had the misfortune of dealing with the “Children’s Vaccine Initiative”. What a total joke. It was all politicking, double-dealing, and selfish grabs. The UN is the last place we should spend money if we want effective aid. Fund Doctors Without Borders.
They don’t want “fair terms of trade”. They want special treatment. They want to have THEIR subsidies but not permit OUR subsidies. Were we truly fair, they would hate us for it.
So, then, we should ignore Amnesty, International, according to you.
DOGFACE, maybe you and ROBERT could have another tiresome debate about the value of post-9/11 foreign policy in another thread, besides this one asking for personal experiences, as opposed to political opinions.
Thanks.
I remember that day. I’d been at college for maybe two weeks; it was my freshman year, my first time out on my own. I woke up that morning in a good mood around 7:30am Central time, and just sat in bed thinking about how good it felt to be warm between the covers.
I’d like to say that I felt a disturbance in the Force around 7:45 that morning. I’d like to think that I had more intuition, that I somehow knew something was wrong. I didn’t. I stayed awake in my bed. I was happy.
Around 8:00, I got out of bed, put my shoes on, grabbed my meal card, and stumbled over to the next building to get breakfast. As I paid for my Diet Coke, chips, and bagel, I noticed that the clerks were talking animatedly about the Oklahoma City bombing. They mentioned it, at least. I wasn’t totally with it, so I went over to the toasted and started toasting my bagel.
I look up from my toaster towards the door to the cafeteria, and there’s this girl standing there looking at the lunch ladies, and her eyes are just getting wider and wider. I start paying attention to what they’re saying, then blurt out a “What’s going on?”
They tell me, and about 45 seconds later I’m back in my dorm room trying to get to CNN.com. I see what’s going on and I frantically IM one of my online friends, the only one who’s online…I don’t get him, but I get his roommate, who reads what I’ve typed on the screen and starts responding to me frantically (he didn’t know; I didnt know it was his roommate for months afterwards). I had class at 9 that morning, and the professors would not cancel it. When the towers fell, I was in class not-listening to my professor talk about Aristotle. We weren’t allowed to talk about it; one of the girls in there learned that the towers fell, but the teacher wouldn’t let her get the sentence out. We had all our classes that day; they wanted to pretend that nothing happened.
That night, I kept on going into the lounge and watching CNN. The footage of people jumping from the buildings really upset me, and my boyfriend made me promise that I would stop watching, as I was getting hysterical and there wasn’t anything I could do at the moment.
Now, two years later. . .I still go to CNN.com. The person I IMd that morning is still a friend; we talk about current events a lot. It’s like a safety cushion; we know we’ve been through worse. I’m much more aware of current events. I don’t like Bush any more or any less than I did beforehand, although I guess I have more sympathy for him now. Even if I disagree with almost everything he’s done as president, he’s got a hard job, and that can’t be fun or easy.
I’m no longer with my boyfriend from that time, though I did lose my virginity to him, a decision that may or may not have been induced by the fact that we though the world was going to come crashing down around us. We’re still friends, I guess; we still talk. I’m engaged now; and if the world’s going to come crashing down, I don’t know who I’d rather be safer with.
I started (trying) to donate blood again, though my iron count is chronically low. I have more appreciation for firefighters than I did before (I always REALLY respected paramedics).
I don’t know that I love my country any more. We’re the sum of our individual parts; I’d rather pledge my allegiance to a set of principles. I hold my freedom much more dearly than I did before, and I honor those who fight for it.
But mostly, I appreciate my fellow man more. There were only about thirty bad guys on September 11th, 2001. There were more than ten times that many heroes.
Moderator’s note:
Dogface, Robert, this isn’t the thread or forum. If you want to thrash out causes and effects, either start your own (civil) thread here or take it to the Pit.
Don’t hijack the intent of this thread.
TVeblen,
IMHO mod
A lot of stuff has changed in my life, but I don’t know that any of it is related to the attacks. I got engaged two months later, but we were planning to get married after he graduated anyway. I moved to North Carolina, but we were going to have to move for his residency anyway.
We had 5 surgeries to be done on 9/11/01, and our patients didn’t stop needing care just because some assmonkeys decided to blow up a bunch of people. We brought the television to the surgical prep area so we could keep up with the news and kept going. I was pulling instruments for the next fracture repair when the towers came down.
My favorite uncle was a vice president for the Emerson Electronics subsidiary that handles their defense contracts. He travels for business a LOT, so much that we can’t keep up with where he is this week, and frequently he’s in New York or Washington. Frequently, he’s at the Pentagon. I didn’t know where he was that day, whether he was in DC or New York or Singapore or somewhere odd like Whorehouse, Michigan, or safe at home in St. Louis. I couldn’t get hold of anyone who knew where he was, either, and that worried me. Not enough to drive me into panic or hysterics, but just a niggling in my mind and heart. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it if he was hurt or killed, so I had to keep on with the stuff I could do something about and hope for the best.
My uncle still travels on business quite a lot, and he’s still with that same defense-contract corporation (now he’s the president, though.) And if someone decides to hijack his plane, there’s still not a damn thing I can do about it. Worrying constantly about his safety would only aggravate my ulcer and make me unhappy all the time, and I know that’s not what he wants for me. He loves me and doesn’t want my life to be a constant morasse of fear and worry, especially not on his account. So I just keep on with the stuff I can do something about and keep hoping for the best.
Not to turn this thread into a political one but…
-i miss the days when servicemen werent dying or killing.
-i miss the budget surplus.
-i feel bad for the muslims who get looked at like they did something.
September 11 was the first day i began to question everything. Which in fact is a positive. Everything being said was different depending on what channel you were on. For the first few hours people were blaming iraq, bin laden, palestinians, pissed off citizens like mcveigh, and anyone else that could have done it. Can you just trust one news source anymore? The answer is no… there is no such thing as ‘fair and balanced’ news. Its pretty damn pathetic that the only thing i can actually believe on the news is the basics such as “a plane has crashed into the world trade center.” Anything after the main point is biased enough to force me not to watch it.
Well more things that have changed…
-spitting on the sidewalk will get you called a terrorist. Im exaggerating, but not that much.
-everyone is WAY too paranoid.