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9/11: Your feelings

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by novelist_wannabe, Sep 10, 2006.

  1. novelist_wannabe

    novelist_wannabe Well-Known Member

    Didn't really do this with the first post because it's not what I was thinking about, but reading all of yours brings it back. I was surfing the net at 9 am when my wife called and told me a plane had hit the WTC. Like everyone else, I turned on the TV, but I didn't see the second plane hit. It didn't occur to me that this was a terrorist attack. I had a weekly presser to go to that day, so I showered, and I didn't know about the second plane until I got in the car and turned on the radio. Even then, life was going on as usual. I had a bill payment to put in the mail. Went in to buy stamps and the postman told me the first tower had collapsed, and that another plane had hit the Pentagon. Then I got back in the car and the reports about Flight 93 were on. Then came what, for me, is the most indelible image I personally witnessed (as opposed to saw on video replay). The traffic information signs on the expressway said "National Emergency. All aviation traffic canceled."

    Later that day, local TV showed middle eastern students celebrating on the campus where I was for the presser. My first thought, and I still feel this way, was, "Fuck, if you don't like this country, you really don't have to be here." You come here to take advantage of what we offer, then rejoice when we get kicked in the teeth. And as someone mentioned, there was the footage of the celebrations in Jerusalem. I'll never forget this one fat lady with bottle-bottom glasses bounding up and down and grinning ear to ear.

    Later that day, I went to visit my grandmother in the hospital, and she said this was exactly like Pearl Harbor, except that there was very little TV coverage in 1941.
     
  2. Webster

    Webster Well-Known Member

    I work in Midtown Manhattan and luckily no one who I was close to passed away. My five biggest memories are the following:

    1) Walking home that day, some of the streets were blocked off from car traffic. I remember walking north in the middle of 3rd Avenue and looking back and watching a sea of people come towards me. Just a strange scene.

    2) Not knowing what to do that day. Because we live only a few blocks from my wife's office, a lot of people she worked with came over (and some from mine as well) and I just felt helpless. Some of us went to the blood bank near my apartment and they told us to go home, because the line was at least five hours long.

    3) I went to work then next day for an hour, figuring that there was a chance that the office would be closed for a while and I picked up materials on some of my more pressing matters. Our work e-mail hadn't been working. But while I was there, the e-mail kicked back in and I got all of these messages from friends around the country wondering if I was OK.

    4) On Wednesday, the 12th, I met friends for a drink and we were sitting outside of a bar on the Upper East Side. The wind, which had been blowing south, began blowing north and the dust from the building began drifiting toward us.

    5) My birthday was that Friday and we had reservations to go to a nice place for dinner. I didn't want to cancel because the stories had already started about how bad business would be impacted. We started to get ready to go, but we were just too depressed to celebrate. We ended up just sitting there in the living room and didn't even eat that night.
     
  3. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    Maybe I feel differently because I was close to it. I stood on my roof deck, watched in horror as the second plane hit and saw the buildings burn and collapse. I know people who died or lost relatives there. I had been in the buildings many times for work or to visit people. I used to do a lot of my shopping in the stores below. It is just two subway stops.

    9/11 cast a pall over where I live for months. I volunteered a few days a week at the site in the months afterward, and 21 is right. People who saw the devastation before the clean up, up close, were deeply affected. Going to the site now isn't nearly as dramatic (or traumatic), but if you have memories of what was there, it is startling--no matter how many times you look.

    I don't have a problem with the commemorations. I think we should be reminded often, because time desensitizes our memories. Thousands of people lost their lives that day. For hours and days, I remember that feeling of uncertainty; not knowing what was was going on, wondering if the world was coming to an end. I don't cry with ease. As sad as I felt, I couldn't find tears when my mom died, for example. On 9/11 I cried. I had never felt that way in my life and probably won't again. Nothing about the cold war ever felt that way.

    I don't want our memories to fade so much with time that we are lulled into a sense of complacency and lose our vigillance.
     
  4. Armchair_QB

    Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

    I was running late for work and had CNN on in the bedroom as I was getting ready. Just got out of the shower and Paula Zahn was reporting that a plane had hit one of the towers at the World Trade Center. At the time it was believed to be a small private plane. Shortly after that they showed the first shots of the tower and my initial thought was, "that's too big a hole to be a small plane."

    A few minutes later as she is describing what's going on with the first tower, the second plane hits the other tower and its pretty clear what's going on. We're under attack. I remember thinking that this was a Tom Clancy-kind-of-deal. Two guys stole jets from airports somewhere and flew them into the buildings. It never occured to me that a). somebody could hijack a jet full of passengers and force the pilots to fly them into those towers or b). somebody could hijack a jet full of passengers, overpower the pilots and fly the planes into those towers themselves.

    My wife was out of town on business and my big concern was where she was at that moment. She wasn't in NYC or DC or anyplace like that, but at that point no one knew what was going to happen next. We talked several times through the day and she got home no problem a couple days later. I remember her saying how crowded the interstate was on her drive home when she did get back.

    When I got to the office that day I didn't watch TV. I had the radio on in my office and just threw myself into my work. I heard the reports of people jumping out of the buildings, heard the reports of the towers falling. I remember an announcer saying. "The Twin Towers are gone."

    For some reason, even with all the death and madness on that day, the thought of those helpless people on those planes is one I'll never get out of my mind. I don't know why. That's the one thing that sticks out about that day. What happened to the men and women at the WTC and the Pentagon is horrible. But they never saw it coming. The people on those planes HAD to see what was about to happen right before impact. I can't imagine what was going through their minds.
     
  5. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    FB, We are on the same page on this one. I am very dismayed at what this administration has done. They have put the constitution and the legislative branch in their back pocket and done whatever they want to do. I absolutely see the danger of setting the kinds of precedents they have and it infuriates me as much as it does you.

    My only point was that the effect of their actions, in practical terms, hasn't affected most people. They have bent and twisted the constitution. They haven't quite ripped it up and set it on fire, though. At least yet. What Joseph McCarthy did to the Constitution affected more Americans than what they have done, for example. What Richard Nixon did to this country extralegally, was way more dramatic than what George Bush has done. Maybe you disagree, but I think a lot of other people would agree with me on this one.

    Most people haven't stopped living because of Big Brother. That was my only point. I wasn't saying that to excuse it when the administration ignores the constitution. You should know from other threads about how I feel about that. What I was saying, though, is that I really do feel as free today as I did five years ago. So do most people. The post that started this thread, basically said, "My life really isn't much different today than it was five years ago."
     
  6. Ragu --
    Agree, and nothing saddens me more. I got on this bandwagon long ago, when the idiotic "War On Drugs" started, and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments took their first big whippin'. I stayed on it during the Clinton years -- impeachment was an act of ideological lunacy, but he was the worst president on the Bill of Rights in my lifetime up until the current crew -- when it was D's ratcheting it up.
    If the Bill of Rights has no constituency in and of itself, the country's gone.
     
  7. Platyrhynchos

    Platyrhynchos Active Member

    Emotions ran the gamut that day.

    I live in flyover country, right in the heart of the U.S. I remember for about three days afterward it sure seemed weird to see no jet contrails in the sky.

    I remember having fire department training on the night of 9-11. Didn't get much training done. Everyone just went through the motions.
     
  8. NoOneLikesUs

    NoOneLikesUs Active Member

    I had the MSNBC replay on for a bit, but turned it off. For me, there's no value in watching it again.

    I can remember feeling totally fucked up for about two months or more after 9/11. I didn't see any of the planes hitting live. My brother came over to wake me during the ordeal, but I honestly have no memory of the exact moment I was coherent.

    I had an interview planned with a prep footballer that day, but school shutdown and practice was canceled. So, I bascially hit the streets with a digital camera to take photos of the calm. The mall was closed. The main business district was a ghost town. Nobody was on the roads.

    Work was an endless stream of phone calls. Lots of questions about flight 93. It supposedly flew over my paper's coverage area before crashing. I recall getting bitched at by the sports editor for not having my prep interview done. I swear he blocked out everything that was going on that day. He was in a huff over canceled prep volleyball games. I ended up getting a hold of the football kid on the phone.

    During the drive home that night the roads were lonely, but the skies weren't. I was buzzed by what seemed to be two fighter jets flying really low. It certainly wasn't out of the question because an air base was only 30 miles away.
     
  9. shockey

    shockey Active Member

    my feelings: :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(

    i was in denver, where the giants had lost to the broncos the night before. a friend in denver called my hotel room to say i wouldn't be flying home because of what had happened. i turned on the tv just before the second plane hit.

    three of us made the cross-country drive home together three days later. when we finally could see the smoke-hazed skyline as we approached n.y., it looked like one of my kids smiling after he'd lost his front teeth. i got home to learn 35 people from my town had been killed, 10 of them we knew, including the father of my oldest son's good friend and my middle son's soccer coach. that kid is now the v.p. of their high school.his older, beautiful sister is in college, the youngest, a girl, starting middle school.

    it's why springsteen's "the rising," especially the song, "you're missing," touched my family and town so much.

    our feelings on 9/11?

    :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(
     
  10. I came within two days of being stranded in Churchill, Manitoba.
     
  11. Gold

    Gold Active Member

    I drove my daughter to first grade that day, and didn't turn on the radio before we got to school - sometimes I put Radio Disney on, sometimes the news. But I was glad I didn't turn on the radio that day (Ilive on the west coast).

    I turned on the sports radio station and obviously something had happened. Since I turned on in the middle, I couldn't tell exactly what. My first thought was that somebody had shot down a plane carrying the president. Then it seemed uncertain, and I don't think anybody was sure right away about what happened to Flight 93, where the passengers fought back and the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. I had wondered if that was shot down by the Air Force - you might have been able to justify that on the grounds that they could have crashed it into a city and killed a lot more people.

    I worked for the federal government and I figured we would be sent home (it turned out they called right after I left), but I thought I should go there anyway just to be sure. We were sent home after about three hours the next day. My first reaction was to go see my daughter to see if she was OK, and the teacher sent her over to see me at the end of recess, which really made me feel good. I remember Mark McGwire, whose kids were in California, say he was upset because they didn't close the schools in California that day. He was completely wrong - in the first place, some parents wouldn't have been able to get the kids. In the second place, the kids might have come home and just watched the atrocity on television.

    I had purchased a house and moved in about two weeks earlier, and during those two days I did a lot of painting the walls. I felt like I wanted to build something as a response to the destruction, and the painting kept me away from the television.

    My father was a fireman for 36 years in New Jersey, so I couldn't stop thinking about the firemen - I knew a lot of other people died, but the firemen were what I was thinking about. I also remembered being really moved when the National Anthem played at the games I covered - I usually was thinking that was a routine thing and thought playing it before each game trivialized the National Anthem, but it certainly had meaning then.

    I remember coming back from a game somebody was on a sidewalk and just waving an American flag back and forth at passing cars, all of whom beeped their horn. That was really moving.
     
  12. Gold

    Gold Active Member

    The first effect I saw was when I went to the airport for a business trip in March 2002 - I saw National Guardsmen with submachine guns in California, and I really didn't want to fly. That made me feel less secure, because my gut feeling was that the National Guardsmen probably weren't well-trained for the situation. When I got to Atlanta, I saw people with sidearms and I was OK with that because they looked like cops who seemed more professional. I have flown in an airplane one other time and expect to fly to Europe later this year, but I would now look to drive if at all possible because going thru the airport is more difficult and takes longer - I wouldn't fly from southern California to San Francisco or anywhere within 600 or 700 miles if no absolutely necessary, but I would probably acknowledge that driving might well be more dangerous.

    As for the World Trade Center, I think that means more to younger people (I'm over 50) and to foreigners - it obviously did to the terrorists - than to me. Let me explain. I remember a time before the World Trade Center. I don't mean to diminish the horror of that action, but I thought there were other more meaningful symbols of New York, such as the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the United Nations, and even Yankee Stadium. Those are all still in place. As horrible as the World Trade Center attack was, if the plane, God forbid, had hit the Empire State Building the damage would have been much worse.

    I have always thought that if there was a failure on the part of the US Government, no matter who was in charge, it would be a failure of imagination. Think about this - what if an agent had stumbled on the plot a month earlier, and told somebody what the terrorists had planned. Any defense plans were based on the idea of hijacking a plane and holding hostages. If the agent had found out about the plan, what would the reaction have been? Would airport security have been tightened up? Would the agent have been dismissed as a crackpot or self-promoter or manipulator? Would you have thought that nobody would just kill themselves to bring this off - no rational person would do that? What would you have thought before September 11, 2001?
     
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