Who else wants to confess an unorthodox or inappropriate response on 9/11/01?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Really, I’m a good person. But this will make me sound like a *bad *person, which, again, I’m really not. I have presumably already scotched any chance of being a politician anyway, but if I hadn’t, this will be the end (though a few years ago I would have said the same about someone with a name like Obama’s who had a preacher like Jeremiah Wright, so who really knows).

The night of 9/10/01 into the early hours of 9/11, I watched the film *Memento *for the first time, staying up all night as I am wont to do on many an occasion. I was pretty blown away, so I watched it again, but this time reversing the scenes into chronological order. Then I started reading reviews on IMDb, something I almost always do after seeing a movie.

In the process of navigating online, I happened to see a headline and a photo of the WTC and wondered “why are they revisiting that bombing years later?” But then I took another look and cottoned onto what was actually going on. I flipped on the TV for a minute, took it all in (both towers were burning but not yet collapsed, and the Pentagon had been hit), muttered to myself “well, there go our civil liberties”…and then turned off the TV and went back to reading *Memento *reviews on IMDb.

Also, when I did turn on the TV later and watched the endless replays (before they went too far the other way and banished them from screens forever), I thought the one angle (where you can see the flaming shape of the plane make an impression into the building) looked kind of badass. But I think a ton of people secretly think that but just don’t say it (c’mon, fess up…amirite?). And part of me was a little disappointed that due to the preemptive crash in Shanksville, we were denied the spectacle of seeing a plane go into the Capitol or the White House (presumably evacuated, so it’s not *that *heinous) on live TV.

2

(shrug) The jet-shaped hole might’ve been kinda cool if you didn’t think too deeply about it.

In addition to listening to the radio news and having a couple news websites open I logged on hereto see if everybody was safe. Thanks to Facebook etc everybody today has invisible internet friends they care about, but that was decidedly odd in 2001.

3

I heard about the first plane hitting shortly after 8am CST after I had settled in at work, listening to my radio, and just assumed it as an accident. Then the second plane hit while I was listening to a man-on-the-street interview. I paused, thought to myself “Well, that’s terrorism”, got up and chatted with a few co-workers, then while they tried the internet and TV to get more info, I just went back to my radio and kept working.

“Nothing I can do about it”, I thought - still deeply disturbed, but I kept doing my job. Got a lot of work done before the first tower collapsed, actually…

4

I was sick and awful tired when it happened; my first groggy reaction to seeing the news coverage was “I can’t believe that Bush actually went and did it.”

5

I was not yet 11-years-old so I was understandably too on edge and innocent to have any inappropriate responses. I actually only have select memories from that day.

6

I got home from work and said to my husband, “How happy is Gary Condit?”

Then I returned to being properly overwhelmed, and sad.

I’ll cop to inappropriate response to the relentless stream of “never forget.” I wasn’t gonna forget. A guy I went to high school with was a trader at Goldman Sachs and died in whichever building their offices were in. Every year a whole bunch of people from our high school who never gave him the time of day or a second thought trot out his name. “Remembering [Name SPELLED WRONG!Gah!] today.” There’s no way half of them would be remembering him if he hadn’t been a headline in the local paper. It just rubs me the wrong way. Sometimes I consider calling them on it, but who would that help?

7

I was listening to the Tony Bruno (radio) show on the drive in, and the big sports story that weekend was the possible return of Michael Jordan to the NBA via the Washington Wizards. As I was pulling into the parking lot, Tony said to his co-host Andrew Siciliano…

“And now CNN is pulling away from it’s wall-to-wall Michael Jordan coverage to show us pictures of a building on fire.”

They quickly understood what was happening and righted themselves, but I bet Tony wishes he got that one to do over. Wasn’t the worst thing he could have said, but his tone was pretty sarcastic.

8

Of course it was.

9

When I saw the towers collapse for the first time, I burst out loud laughing.

The laugh was unique- it was probably the only time in my life that I laughed like that. It wasn’t out of joy, nor did I actually find it particularly funny. I was laughing at the absurdity of it.

It was a thoughtless, instant response. I would like to say I was laughing because my mind couldn’t believe what it was seeing was real. I am not sure why that’s the reaction my mind chose to go with.

I think… that it’s the sort of reaction one might have if they got fired from their job, car broke down on the way home, and then found out a fire had destroyed their home and their family, but the family dog escaped, to be run over by a truck.

It’s sort of a beyond sadness kind of laugh, I suppose.

But I haven’t admitted it to anyone before because they might not understand- it was not a happy laugh.

10

A few days after the incident, I forwarded a joke – the one about changing the flight number to wingdings – to a few work colleagues.

I got a telling off about it, but I regretted it even before that.
My only excuse is that it was my first job out of college and I was an idiot.

11

I’m in Australia. I got up on the morning (I think it was September 12 here), got the kids organised for school and as usual put on the TV for them to watch while eating breakfast and saw the live footage of the towers on fire ( I think it was live) and the second plane hitting the tower, things starting to collapse and sat there with my mouth open.

Until after about 5 minutes, the kids cracked the sads cos they wanted to watch cartoons so I switched over to the Disney channel and got ready to go to work.

12

I was trying to be a day-trader at the time (shut up), and at first I was mostly annoyed that the markets weren’t opening and Bloomberg was yammering on about terrorists instead of Enron (which I was long in–you can laugh now) as well as other financial news/concerns I’m now forgetting. Also, I was to be married in two weeks and was worried that the whole mess might interfere with our modest plans.

However, I’ll never forget standing out on my balcony that evening with my fiance, looking up at the characteristic red-tinged NW Indiana twilight at some military (?) planes from Chicago, and shivering with fear that the War had come, given that we had heard that all flights had been cancelled for the nonce. And my fiance had to go out to NY a few days later to help repair the affected businesses phone systems–I had never been so worried for him prior or since. We aren’t married any longer, but my memory of all that is still very fresh and poignant.

13

Different kind of “inappropriate”:

My partner and I had relocated from NYC only a few years prior to 9/11, and still in some ways considered ourselves New Yorkers. And my last apartment there had a view of the towers. So when I saw the events happening on TV, my immediate reaction was guilt that I hadn’t been there with all the other New Yorkers. And I have to say, non-New Yorkers, no matter how empathetic, can have no idea what it must have been like there, and I needed to be with other people who understood that. I was actually thinking of going there on the first plane I could get, until my partner explained all the hundreds of reasons why I shouldn’t go.

And to this day, I still feel kind of guilty that I wasn’t there. And to this day, people say things like “Aren’t you glad you left NY prior to 9/11?” They just don’t understand.

14

My friend committed suicide the night before and died early in the morning in hospital. When I finally cottoned on to something happening I just wanted everyone to shut up about all those far-away people I didn’t know. I felt a weird, irrational anger that they would disturb my friend’s pain and then death with world news, headlines, buildings, terrorism. It all seemed so fake to me, the reactions I was seeing. People were upset, but their friends hadn’t died (for some people yes, but I was in the Netherlands, the people around me weren’t losing friends yet they were still upset.)

Really understanding what happened only came quite a bit later, for me.

15

This wasn’t so much a response to the actual attacks as to the annual memory-fest.

You know, I’ve had friends and loved ones die and while I remember them and “honor” their memory (what does that mean anyhow?) I don’t hold little ceremonies every year on the anniversary of their death no matter how senseless or tragic.

Every year, though, the entire country is supposed to go into mourning for one day?

Look, I get it that it was a traumatic experience and I can certainly understand New Yorkers and the immediate family of the dead having some impetus toward a memorial, but Bumfrack, Indiana? Sure, mention it like we do Pearl Harbor every year, but all flags at half mast and ceremonies of remembrance thousands of miles away from the occurrence?

It’s sad, but aside from being grounded from flying for about (if I recall correctly) 10 days it didn’t really have a direct impact on me. I’m not going to forget it happened - it was one of those “where were you when -?” events - but at this point in my life 9/11/13 is just another day in the calendar. I’m sorry if that offends anyone but life moves on. Moving on doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten or dishonored the dead, it just means you’re still alive.

As far as I’m concerned a mention on the morning news of “this is the anniversary of…” and a maybe a moment of silence is sufficient, but for some people I guess that’s not enough.

16

The Onion summed up that feeling (i.e. that we were witnessing an absurdly impossible spectacle) with a whole series of articles two weeks later. One of the best:

American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie

The article managed to combine humor at the incredible visual impact and similarity to over-the-top action movies with an acknowledgement of the sadness and significance of it all.

A Yahoo news article about The Onion’s first post-9/11 issue. The article contains links to some of The Onion’s other great articles from that day.

17

Agreed, Broomstick. Those people’s lives shouldn’t be any more commemoratable than anyone else who has died (other than maybe the firefighters but even then they get memorialised more than other firefighters who died in the line of duty).

Gracer, my dad was a suicide so I feel your pain. Kind of unfair, like (in a different way) people with Sept. 11 anniversaries or birthdays.

Something that makes my blasé response perhaps even more bizarre: just as recently as 1997 I lived in Jersey City and took the PATH train every morning over to my job in Lower Manhattan. I never worked in the WTC itself, but the station I used was the one below the towers, so I walked through that lobby ten times a week.

And my apartment was near the Exchange Place station on the Jersey side. People from outside the area may think “oh you were way over in Jersey”; but anyone from the area knows that we basically had the WTC towering over us. It is literally a four minute subway ride from there to the WTC–those are two adjacent stops.

I didn’t know anyone who works in the WTC though; and the kind of people I hung out with were far more like the hipsters in the infamous photo that Frank Rich highlighted, than like the traders at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Not familiar with it. Don’t leave us hanging!

I loved the Onion “Holy Fucking Shit” issue, especially the woman from the Midwest who baked a flag shaped cake. :smiley:

Another arguably inappropriate response I had in the post-9/11 period was to be kind of mortified by all the garish poor taste being put on display. It was like we needed a Queer Eye for the Whole Fucking Country or something, LOL. And the miniature flag factories in China had to go into overdrive so everyone could festoon their SUVs with patriotic flair…blech. The ascent of Pelosi and then Obama was rather refreshing in its palate-cleansing nature, after five years of being vomited on by all that red-white-and-blue confetti.

Omigod, that’s right! LOL (Although on the flip side, it may have prevented people from being fully aware that he was later proven to be innocent.)

ETA: Machine Elf, GMTA. Which reminds me: does anyone else remember when there was all kinds of sonorous talk about when it would be appropriate to laugh again, and how we would henceforth be a more serious country that is not trafficking in celebrity gossip and sensationalism? Ha, I knew that was a joke from the get-go.

18

I remember not really caring, and being surprised that my father shed a tear that day. I wasn’t really sure why people were so glued to the TVs other than the fact that it was sorta cool to see real destruction on a grand scale. I was 13 at the time, but I think my reaction would be the same today except peppered with some additional “Well there go our civil liberties” thoughts.

“Worse crap than this happens every month in some other war-torn countries, but only when someone kills a bunch of people HERE does anybody give a shit! Ugh.” is the thought I would get on the following few anniversaries when everyone acted like it was the worst thing that happened ever. Sure, it’s awful for the people who actually knew somebody in the towers that died that day, but I’m not sure why this pings so high on the weeping scale for people that were uninvolved entirely. The vast majority of the USA is just as uninvolved with the conflicts in the DRC but I haven’t personally seen anyone weeping over anyone dying over there. Just pure patriotism fueling it I guess.

19

Once we all understood what was going on, I imagined seeing this printed as a paid ad in the New York Times:
Attention Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden:

You are reprehensible villains and you will pay for what you have done. What you did was an inexcusable act of terrorism and no one will stand by you; the world will see to your demise.

Be that as it may, if in the intervening weeks or months between now and when we hoist your carcass into the air and celebrate your death, you should find yourself driven to wreak more destruction and add to your crimes, we would like to draw your attention to the large black tower occupying the block between 47th and 48th Street along the west side of 1st Avenue, a structure known locally as the Trump World Tower. We cannot condone any portion of your evil agenda but if you are determined to attack the American people by destroying our buildings, we observe that this one is quite tall and looms over everything around it and would be a convenient target.

We will dance in the streets to celebrate your defeat. My your children’s children speak yet in horror of the things we will do to you when we catch up with you.
– The Turtle Bay Association

backstory more

20

Oh, it’s not funny in the slightest.

Something about the flight number being (…uses windows character map…) Q33N

Which in wingdings looks a bit like a plane going into buildings.

Yeah mailing it round was pretty dumb. Not the stupiderist thing I’ve ever done, but up there.