That would have been horrifying, and epic. Not epic in the current slacker-speech meaning, but I think seriously epic.
I can only imagine the type of state we’d be living in right now if that plane had made it…and I don’t like what my imagination is coming up with.
But watching the Capitol burn? After watching the towers go down, and seeing the pentagon get hit … ssshhhheeeeewwwwwww man that’s a heavy thought. The hysteria … we’d have probably nuked the entire middle east in a fit of rage.
I had returned from a business trip the night before so I had slept a little later than usual and I didn’t turn on the TV when I woke up. At a few minutes before 9 I went into the living room and turned on the TV. Nothing.
Booted up the computer in the home office, got clued into what was happening and “watched” it unfold on-line – no streaming video back then, just a series of articles coming on the front page in red.
Got an e-mail from the company in Utah I was working for and assured them I was OK. I got through to my parents and my boyfriend, who had been driving into Manhattan when it happened and was totally stuck in traffic near the GW Bridge.
Then I thought … no reason to be at work ( I worked at home then ) so I went grocery shopping which I hadn’t done because of the weekend business trip. There were two reasons for the decision, I think.
One was that I could listen to the car radio and get a better idea of what was happening since 9/11 apparently knocked out the cable TV. Also, I think I just needed to be around other people, even if they were strangers at the supermarket.
I did a typical grocery shopping, except I bough lots of extra ice cream, my comfort food. I did see one lady buying 2 or 3 carts full of bottled water which caused me to roll my eyes a little bit.
By the time I got home the TV was back up and I sat in front of the TV set in a state of semi-shock the rest of the day.
The next day the boyfriend made it into the city and he came and picked me up and we sat in a packed Irish sports bar watching CNN on TV for the better part of that day.
The morning of 9/11, my roommate had come into my room and woken me up twice times. She wanted to borrow my sunglasses, and wanted to know if she could eat the last of the cereal. When she knocked the third time, I sat up and said, “Dude, something had better be on fire.”
She replied a plane had hit the WTC. At some point while we stood slack-jawed watching the news footage, I turned to her and said, “Well, it’s definitely on fire.”
Now my old roomies and I make annual jokes about yep, it was on fire. (And various other bits of black humor.)
I should add we were in NJ, and all of us had personal connections to the event, not to mention it just being physically and emotionally close to the city. And we are all unreasonably irritated by the recreational mourning of people further away. I don’t need some dipshit from Ohio telling me to “Never Forget!” on Facebook. I remember what it smelled like.
This article about phone sex operators on 9/11 made me think about this thread:
(NSFW)
Two of my friends have 11th September birthdays. I think their inappropriate reaction is to wish that it had happened on any other day.
I was kinda of young to have any kind of inappropriate response, I didn’t have much response at all. I can remember being in a Jack In The Box drive thru where the sky was so empty and quiet that night.
But my father had a response that turned out very wise, he wasn’t raging or sad or anything he just said “this will change everything” and he was right. His response was only that from this day forward everything is different.
I was an asshole teenager on a school trip to Bulgaria. Got extremely drunk and made inappropriate jokes all night. Hit a karaoke and sang “it’s raining planes” instead of, you know, “it’s raining men.”
Basically, I felt that “America deserves it” because of something something Israel something something Middle East. As should be obvious by now, I was a fucking retard at the time. I’ve grown up since.
At some point in the day I felt really bad for whoever was in charge of the insurance.
Macca26: I don’t know if it was The Onion or some other such outlet that ran a headline sort of to the effect of: “Israel, Britain, Spain, India to America: Join The F*&^%ing Club” So it was not unthinkable at all.
I laughed out loud while watching the live footage in 11th grade history class because I thought it was a joke.
But it’s New York, and everything that happens there is more important than the rest of the country. :rolleyes:
(which is why we’re still hearing about 9/11 12 years later, and all the bitching and moaning about hurricane Sandy still. You didn’t hear this level of whining about Ike or any of the Florida hurricanes a year later.)
My response to the 9/11 event was as follows: I had the day off because I had a job interview later that day for a different job far enough away that I couldn’t just pop in and out. I was awakened by a phone call from a frantic friend at about the time that the second plane hit. My response was to hurry into the living room, flip on the news, and go wake my roommate up to come watch. It had the feel of a weird action movie, rather than a real tragedy, due to the news coverage, etc… I was watching when the plane hit the pentagon and the news correspondent said there had been a loud bang or something, and I watched the towers fall live on TV. It had a really surreal feel.
I guess the really inappropriate response was sticking to the job interview plan and making them interview me, deciding that the job wasn’t for me (had nothing to do with the events of the day; the company was backward technologically) and then ending the interview in the middle.
I remember that. When they came back from commercial at the very end, Stewart was leaning over like he was hiding something under the desk. Then he said something like “And now it’s time for your Moment of Zen…a puppy!” And he pulled the puppy out from under the desk and walked around the set holding it.
Damn. The room gets dusty every time I think about it.
As for me, the memory that sticks out most is when I called my mom after I got back to my dorm room. She started laughing, like she didn’t understand what I had just said and thought I was joking. I was shocked. My mom would never have done something like that. My dad came home then and took the phone away from her. I asked him if he knew what had happened, he did and he said, “I’ll explain it to her.” That’s when I realized how bad Mom’s dementia was getting.
More people died and there was a hell of a lot more monetary damage from Sandy. And its more recent than Katrina.
Yeah, but it was a weaker hurricane overall than either Ike or Katrina.
It’s hard to be sympathetic when the main reason for all the excess destruction is primarily due to lack of preparation and foresight.
(FTR, I don’t feel sorry for fools who build in flood plains and then whine when the river rises and their shit floats away either)
I had three points:
[ol]
[li]When I first saw the footage, thinking it was a movie or something, I thought, “that looks so fake”.[/li][li]I’d ordered something from Amazon recently, and on 9/10 UPS had mis-shipped it to the far end of the country (as shown by online package tracking). Thanks to the ground stop they couldn’t fly it back, so over the next week tracking saw my package being driven slowly cross-country. How totally inconvenient for me.[/li][li]A former colleague of mine was flying back from Australia, so when ground stop happened, the plane landed in Hawaii where he was forced to stay in a hotel paid for by Quantas until the planes were allowed to take off. Lucky bastard.[/li][/ol]
(And, you know, mixed in with a bunch of sensible and appropriate responses, but the thread doesn’t ask about those).
I had the same reaction though, and I didn’t have dementia. Some people just react weirdly to tragedy. I reacted the same way when someone told me a classmate died in 7th grade. I figured there was no way they could be serious.
Dubious about the veracity as the timeline is inverted wrt the WTC and the Pentagon.
That was the new CW for a a while after 9/11, to the point that it was, no offense to your dad, a cliché. But was he right? I really don’t think he was. Before 9/11, as someone reminded us up thread, the news media was obsessed with Gary Condit. Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped in 2002. Nancy Grace’s show didn’t even start until 2005. How is “everything different” now? Everything? Really? Or just a few things, like taking your shoes off at the airport, and having bells rung once a year in lower Manhattan?
How did you “make” them? Couldn’t they just call it off they wished?
For a couple weeks prior to 9/11, I was really hoping that some big news story would come along and knock this off the top of the news. BUT NOT THIS BIG.
They asked if we could reschedule it considering the events of the day, and I basically said no, I’ve taken the day off, and want to do the interview anyway.