So before it happened you knew Bush was wanting to bring the towers down and that he was just biding his time waiting for a good opportunity? Why didn’t you warn anybody?
I got back into the office to find only a couple of people there. All the big bosses had rushed off to the casino - they have a big TV to watch - because apparently there’d been some accident in New York.
I went on line and watched the scenario unfold.
The bosses all filed in later, all full of themselves since they’d seen it all and therefore knew much more than us in the office. I don’t know whether I felt more dismayed because they thought they had one over us, or because they were all so far up their own arses they didn’t think to check it on line and had run across town like the bunch of schoolboys that they are. Don’t work there anymore!
I remember my dad woke me up and said “a plane just ran into the World Trade Center” and I was like “huh? what?” and went back to sleep. I’ve admitted here on the boards before that I had no idea what the WTC was at the time. It just wasn’t something that had crossed my 22-year-old path.
When the second tower went down is when I got up. My dad was a little freaked out by then…I honestly think I remember him getting his VFW or American Legion hat out of the closet in case he got called back up (??)
Anyway, at some point I found out that my boyfriend at the time had spent the night of 9/10 in bed with a girl he was cheating on me with, and I believe they spent the morning together watching the news coverage and for a long time that was my memory of 9/11. That was sort of…how it affected me?
And my mom’s birthday is 9/10. Every year 9/11 kind of creeps up on me because we have a lovely celebration with cake and singing the night before. Then suddenly everyone else in the world is somber.
I was in high school. I remember later in the day I thought to myself, “I wonder how they’re going to cover this on the Daily Show.”
I was 18. Watching the towers come down was horrific. It’s easy in retrospect to say it had no effect on the rest of the country, but when it was unfolding in real time it wasn’t clear what the hell was happening. First one tower, then the other, then one hit the pentagon and there were rumors of other planes still up in the air. The media had such a strong presence that it was impossible not to feel for all of those people dying on live television. The feeling of sheer helplessness watching those towers fall was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life. The terror of those poor people! That’s leaving aside the fact that many, I might venture to say most Americans knew someone living in NYC. Those tense hours were largely spent frantically trying to get in touch with loved ones.
I had no political background to place the event into context, all I knew is that our country was under attack. I didn’t understand the concept of terrorism very well, so when Brokaw said, ‘‘our country is now at war,’’ I’m thinking war, you know? Bombs dropping on our cities for years, home invasions. Would our president be killed? Would our government be overthrown? I was confused and afraid, and so were a lot of people. What happened was horrible, but what made it horrible for everyone following along at home was the idea of what might happen to all of us. That’s what I think so many people fail to understand. At the time it was happening, we had no idea why it was happening or when it would stop. That period of uncertainty was very frightening.
There are two levels of trauma here. There is individual trauma for the unfortunate souls who were directly impacted by the attacks. That is its own, deeply personal thing and what the average home viewer felt that day cannot ever compare. Then there is the collective trauma of a nation. Events have symbolic meaning, especially now that this event has been placed into historical context and we know that it radically altered the political landscape of our country. 9/11 is a permanent part of our historical narrative.
It’s absolutely true that terrorism is an everyday reality for many people all over the world, but that in no way negates what happened on 9/11. Suffering is not a zero sum game. Those of us who remember do so because we were scared shitless. To expect us to not remember such a frightening event is pretty unrealistic. It boggles my mind that many people live with it every single day of their lives. Many of us are furious about the things the U.S. has done to other countries and make our policy decisions accordingly. Many of us remember that day as the day we woke up to the reality of global conflict.
The last character is a skull and crossbones!
Q33NY (Q33NY) which looks like “plane, tower, tower, death’s head, star” - the 6-pointed star could mean “Zionist conspiracy!!11!” or just “explosion”.
I was at my university working when it happened and I remember, unfortunately, one of the first thoughts that crossed my mine was “I have 20 something carts of books that need to go back on the shelves and I bet none of our student workers are going to be coming in today.”
I felt sad and did get a little teary-eyed that night while watching the footage play over and over again on QVC (it was the only channel that I could tune into…since the transmission towers had been on the WTC towers).
But during the day? I have never felt a weirder mixture of adrenaline rush and detachment. While my graduate advisor cried next to me, I washed stacks and stacks of test tubes and petri dishes. I kept thinking about whether my evening class was going to be canceled and whether classes the next day would be canceled. I thought about my mother, who I vaguely recalled was in D.C that day, but I wasn’t seriously worried that she’d been hit by the Pentagon attack.
Reflecting on the tears I shed later, it wasn’t really out of grief. I didn’t know those people, so how I could I grieve for them? But I did think about my family and horrible it would have been if they had been in the planes or in the towers. But more than that, I was emotional because I knew Things Were Going to Be Different. Change is always a little scary.
It was a dramatic day, one that I will never forget. But the memory is still quite “cerebral” to me. If I could do it all over again, I would put my arms around my advisor and let her know she wasn’t alone. I’ll always regret not doing that.
Well, to be fair Spice Weasel, I’m not exactly wired the same way everyone else is so I’m not surprised that 9/11 didn’t affect me with the emotions others had. I won’t really go in to the feelings I really felt when I watched the videos other than to say confusion, fear, terror, sympathy, no, those were not the feelings I felt. This is precisely why my take on the event is inappropriate to normal conversation. Suffice to say, that’s kind of why I’m in the inappropriate reactions thread.
By the way, I do think you may be overestimating the amount of people in the USA that knows about a second cousin in new york, much less a close family member. I think there were one or two kids in class that said “My mom knows a coworker who has a spouse that works near there” and that was about it. And we didn’t live too far away in Delaware. It’s not like we were in Idaho.
Collective trauma of a nation…well, ok. Sounds like a dramatic way of saying it, but our government did change how it does business because of 9-11. In my opinion, it was a negative change.
Not personal, but there is no shortage of people who hated the twin towers - as eyesores, as soulless people-boxes, as examples of the sterility of corporate culture, etc. It took about a year before any such opinions very timidly resurfaced.
I do remember walking through the mall levels and thinking, wow there’s a shitload of building above me…
Minutes after the first plane hit, I remembered reading this New York Times “Metropolitan Diary” piece from February 2000:
Ha, good one. Was that when it was still Kilborn?
Agreed! I remember this was spoken of on the DL among my fellow New Yorkers … with the national press talking about how the terrorists had struck at the very symbol of New York (dramatic music), we were all thinking “but no one really liked the twin towers that much in the first place … the very symbol of New York, if you’re going to pick a building, would be the Empire State Building.”
Not on the day of 9/11, but in the time after when the investigation was going on, I remember reading reports of the terrorists trying to plan the attack, and it was maddening how unorganized they were. It took them forever to even decide on a date! I remember thinking “what kind of piss poor project management is THAT?” Not that I wanted them to be more efficient in reality, of course.
I would vote for the Chrysler Building.
Nope, it was John Stewart. He did a good job, I thought. Very little comedy, he just spent most of the show talking about what had happened from his own personal perspective. The only real attempt at levity was at the end of the show, when he hoisted a puppy up onto his desk; it was the sort of thing you would do to cheer an otherwise-inconsolable kid, so it seemed the right thing to do given the subject at hand.
here’s a clip. 10 minutes long, so not the entire thing, but you can get a sense of how the show went.
For me, it was the comment to my boss that morning (we were at an auditing seminar, but everyone had ended up in the lobby of the hotel where it was being held, watching the televisions). I looked at her and said “wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if one of them was actually accidental?”
I wasn’t sure what the World Trade Center was, either, and when I wrote that on these boards a few years ago I was mocked more for that than I’ve been for anything before or since. So I guess that’s a supposedly unorthodox response, though I maintain to this day that the World Trade Center was not as universally known then as it is today. When, on that day, I asked people what the WTC was, no one seemed the least surprised at the question, and not everyone knew the answer.
This is not to defend the reaction, but I just wanted to point out that for better or worse it’s pretty universal. I have no doubt that people in the DRC care more about what’s happening in their conflicts than they do, say, about bad things that happen in Kosovo, and vice versa. It’s hardly surprising that Americans cared more about 9/11 than what happens elsewhere.
Also: I remember reading reports that within hours of the attacks a number of New York City high school seniors were heard to be excited about having the perfect subject for their college application essays. Who knows if that’s apocryphal, though.
I was a freshman in high school in Montgomery County, MD (huge county right next to DC) on 9/11/01. The principal came over the PA during 4th period and told us “The United States is currently in a state of national emergency” and briefly outlined what happened. We watched TV in our class and then went to lunch, everybody hoping it meant we got to go home early.
Sure enough, the principal came back on at the end of lunch, around noon, and told us all county schools were closing and we would be leaving at 12:30. Most of us had to suppress a cheer. Yeah, we’d just been attacked by terrorists and most of us had parents working downtown or at the Pentagon and didn’t know if they were OK, but we got out of school early!
School was closed on 9/12 and that made me happy, too.