9/11

More than the occupancy of the planes, my understanding is that if they'd just flown in an hour later, there would have been a lot more people in the buildings

 

I just ordered "Firehouse". Thanks for the tip.

 

I went to bed late last night and caught the History Channel's 102 minutes special.

For those of you who haven't seen it, they took ameture video and emergency response tapes and reconstructed the moments from when the first plane hit until a short time after the second tower fell. Every second was documented in real time.

It was chilling to watch (and hear) New Yorkers' reactions when the second plane hit, and they realized that we were under attack. That and the empty streets after the second tower fell. Oh and the jumpers. For me, that was the most traumatizing part about 9/11. In my worst nightmares I could not imagine being the people who jumped or fell.

 

Same here.

 

I do recall a lot of speculation at the time that flight 93 was shot down.

 

It'll be interesting to see how quickly the wife grabs it before I have a chance to read it.

 

Excellent book. You can read it in a day. Makes the events very personal.

I remember reading this book on vacation in Pamplona. Had stayed up all night to run with the bulls in the morning. Got a little bit of restless sleep on a sidewalk and was reading it on a street corner while waiting for a bus to Barcelona.

Cried like a baby.

I don't even want to think about this.

First of all, my ex would be dead. She was in the subway on her way to a meeting at Windows on the World. There were back to back meetings being held there. She was only attending the second of the two, but a lot of the folks she was to met with were in the first one. They were all lost that day.

It was also primary election day and the first day of school, so lot of folks were late to work that day because they were voting or taking their kids to school. (Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor, for example only lived because he brought his daughter to school that morning.)

Also, the first plane hit pretty high up in the building. Almost everyone above the impact point died. Almost everyone below lived.

The second plane hit lower in the building, but thankfully, a lot of people evacuated after the first plane hit. (Despite PA announcements that everything was fine.)

Thank God those planes did not hit the buildings lower and/or before people could evacuate.

They did their research. Tuesday morning flights have very low occupancy.

Morning flights also have fewer delays as their hasn't been time for minor delays to cascade through the day.

Again, thank God that flight 93 was delayed and had one fewer hijacker.

The passengers had time to find out what was going on through phone calls and had the bravery & strength to overcome their hijackers.

If they don't act, that plane might have hit the White House, or more likely the Capitol (much bigger target).

While the attack on the World Trade Center was very personal to me (worked there 7 years, was there in '93 when it was bombed, lost friends, etc.), if they had hit the White House or Capitol, the symbolism would have been really devastating I think -- not to mention the additional loss of life.

 

My girlfriend doesn't really "get" 9/11. She was raised in Taiwan and, while she is a US citizen, it just didn't affect her like it did most people.

So while this kind of pisses me off, what was worse is that on Saturday, I was on line to go to the top of the CN Tower in Toronto.

The guy behind me in line is there with his young daughter & strikes up a conversation. He asks what I think about the anniversary of 9/11. I give a kind of generic remorseful reply.

He replies about how many things that day "don't add up".

The guy's a fucking 9/11 Truther.

Starts telling me all about how buildings don't collapse that way, and about "Building 7".

I looked at my girlfriend and she's looking at me with a mixture of laughter & fear that I had the luck to meet up with this guy. But, I'm not going to get into an argument with the guy in a public place in front of his little girl. So I just nod at what he's telling me until I get my tickets and can get away from him.

But it was really not what I needed.

 

The world is a lesser place without these two extraordinary people:

 

Yes, we all mourn the loss of Image hosted by tripod. j/k

Yankee, I get that way too. Saturday, just about everyone I know on Facebook had a 9/11 related status. 95 percent of them were of the "Never forget", "RIP" variety but one person just had to bring up conspriacy theories and I wanted to hit him. Really.

How dumb/ignorant do you have to be to believe two planes crashing into a building had NOTHING to do with its collapse?

I mean, seriously.

And not once, not once, has anyone shown a single shred of evidence that points to, maybe, there possibly being a conspiracy.

I'll accept that the United 93 flight could have been shot down. That I'll believe simply because it's plausible, given the nature of that day that the plane was taken down. But the rest of the conspiracy? The scale of coverup that would be needed? In a government that can't keep anything secret?

Yeah, no, stop being an idiot and look at the facts.

 

I understand the feeling if someone grew up in a war-torn country. If you were growing up in the middle of Afghanistan right now or if you grew up in Bosnia or Haiti or if you've lived the last decade or so in Darfur, you wouldn't look at the deaths of 3,000 people the same way we do. We were simply fortunate to go that long between Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

I suspect someone who lived through the ravages of war in Europe fewer than 75 years ago would be confused how we allowed our country to be paralyzed by fear from the threats of relatively few men who lived in caves, when they dealt with conquering armies marching through their lands.

I imagine it's hard for someone who doesn't grasp the interconnectedness of the modern world to understand the effect such a terrorist attack wreaked on the country.

Doesn't make me agree with it, but I understand the perspective.