The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => History => Topic started by: side_show on September 06, 2006, 04:57:19 pm
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I can't believe the five year anniversary is this Monday. I think it's going to take another 5 years before we fully understand how 9/11 changed the world, our lives, who we are.
Here's a place to post your "where I was" stories and the like.
Where I was: I was lying in bed, and I had to get up really early for a job interview. I lived alone at the time, and I was lying in bed, and the radio kicked on about 15 minutes before the first plane hit. The announcer was talking about an accident. An accident involving a plane and the WTC. I got up and turned on the T.V. and watched live as the second plane hit. I sat there, alone, in my apartment and cried. It was too early to call anyone, so I just sat there and cried. Then news about the pentagon getting hit, images of people jumping to their deaths, another plane crashing in a field came on. Every channel was telling me something was very wrong. I wasn't sure if I should still go in for my job interview or not, but I needed a job so off I went. In the car the news was panic. I went in for the interview, and I waited a really long time. The woman who finally came to interviewe me was in tears when she came to meet me in the lobby, two hours late. I wondered if in the two hours I had sat there if something even worse had happened, but I didn't want to ask. I didn't know it then, but since the call centre I was interviewing at was mainly for FedEx and there was a FedEx depot in the WTC she and my friend who got me the interview had lost coworkers that morning. That people were calling and screaming about their packages, and that the employees were screaming back that no, their package would not come today, and no, they didn't know when, if... I was hired, and two weeks later I met my SO at that very job.
I remember how, for days after, when a plane passed over head, everyone paused and looked up.
I remember seeing flour spilled on the floor at a grocery store, and for a moment the word"anthrax" flashed in my head.
I remember how I was at one of my bestfriend's apartments the night of 9/11, and that there was rotating footage on every channel but one a children's station - we flipped to the Power Rangers and they were blowing up some building, and for a moment we thought another actual building was going down. But it was only the Power Rangers.
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I have rather complex feelings towards the event, which I won't go into detail in order to avoid controversy. My main feeling about it is this: the social and political after effects were far bigger and more important than the event itself.
As for the day itself, it felt more surreal than anything else to me. It was like watching a movie even though it was real.
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I remember getting off the bus from school, and finding a lot of people and cameras around; they were filming a movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294594/) in the village. I stayed a-while to pester the crew, during which I heard a rumour that there had been a plane crash in America. I remember leaving the set, walking home thinking that two planes had collided; this is what I understood at the time.
When I got home, my Mum hushed me and brought me into the living room. With my family (barring my Dad who was in New York at the time) I just sat and stared for a while at the unfurling reports from the BBC. I couldn't identify with the horror, and I couldn't quite take in what was happening beyond the basic events. In that peculiar way that occurs, I still sat, glued to the TV.
The towers collapsing finally kind of hit the nail in. I wasn't a particularly bright 11 year old, but I could understand that this was more death and destruction then I could ever imagine witnessing. I didn't cry; I just sat with my family and felt terrible for all the people but glad that my Dad was safe. (He had called earlier.)
Without really understanding the significance, I'd witnessed '9/11'. Those two numbers carry so much power now; rarely can I ever see, speak or hear them without the image of the BBC news report burning through my mind. They've come to define an era in which terrorism is ever more global and far reaching: think of the Madrid train bombs, the London underground bombs, and the countless acts of terrorism throughout the strife-ridden parts of the world torn apart by religious conflict, violence and civil war.
Either way, 9/11 means a lot to me because it was the first time I really understood the horror that can sometimes be inflicted in the world. It was something that haunted me for days, and it hadn't even affected me directly. Call it an awakening of empathy. But even more so, 9/11 has defined the start of the 'War on Terror' which has led seemingly only to war with Iraq and more terrorism.
I apologise for the length of this post, but I've never really talked about this before. Lot to get off my chest.
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It was my senior year of high school. I was walking into my third-period class, daydreaming about my previous class -- Wood Shop -- and which wood I was going to use for my end-table project. Mahogany was nice, but walnut was definitely tempting; one of those two -- and then suddenly someone is yelling "they've hit the Pentagon!" and the TV is on and I spend the entire period watching. My most immutable memory of that day will always be the sudden, jarring juxtaposition of the first news interrupting my daydreaming about wood shop, as stupid as that sounds.
I spent about half of that third period crying, because my SO was in Boston and I was paranoid that every major city in the eastern U.S. was going to detonate. Then... I kept going to classes. What else was I supposed to do? It felt a little dreamlike, really; the entire thing sounded like the plot of a bad action movie or of a conspiracy theorist's pseudo-"speculative fiction" novelized screed. It just felt unreal. Just goddamn unreal.
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I was at work doing my job when my sister called and said that a plane had crashed into the WTC. I asked some questions, like what kind of plane was it and was it an accident, but she didn't have much detail. I tried to get on Yahoo, but it was crashed due to excess traffic. A few minutes later my Sister called back and said that another plane had crashed into the WTC. I remember saying Oh my god, that can't be an accident. I still couldn't get any news on the internet, but then my Sister called back a third time in tears saying that the tower had fallen. I was in shock, my face got very hot and I could hardly speak. I just sat there in shock not knowing what to do with myself. A short time later one of my co workers informed me that there was a television set in the lab. So I went down there and watched in horror at what I was seeing. The first tower was in rubble and the second tower was in flames. Dan Rather was litteraly in tears as he spoke, but he didn't say much. No one in the room was speaking. A couple of minutes later the second tower fell and I was just paralyzed with fear. All I could think was how easily those buildings had come down. I didn't think it was possible to knock a skyscraper down. My mind was racing with the thought of those airplanes crashing into the building. I pictured being inside the building standing beside the window and seeing the plane approaching and standing powerless as it made a direct impact where I was. Remembering that day I am remembering that horror.
The aftermath was heartening to see such a strong outpouring of support for New York City by the rest of the nation and America in general by the rest of the world. Of course it wasn't long before our President squandered that good will, but that's a subject for another thread.
The one good news was when we learned that the passengers on Flight 93 twarted the fourth plane which was almost certainly headed for The White House or Congress. I was very proud of those brave men, they are heroes.
~Paul
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Holy shit. I can't believe it's been 5 years.
I was in college at the time, in my junior year. I got out of bed for a leisurely shower before class. As I wandered back into my room, I noticed that I had a voicemail on my phone. My boyfriend at the time (the crap dude to whom I later became engaged) left me a very, very terse message: "Babe. Call me. Bye."
All snottily, I thought, "What-EVER! Why is he being suck a dick?" and called him back. I said, "What's wrong?" He swallowed, paused, and said, "Turn on the TV."
I was shocked. Couldn't believe it. At first I thought it was the World Trade Center in Denver, where I lived. He said no, it's New York City. We're under attack. He had to go up to the unit, which was about an hour away where he normally reported once a month for Army Reserve training. I said I would go with him. He said to meet him at his brother Ryan's house which is close to his unit.
I stared open-mouthed at the TV. I started crying when I saw the second plane hit. I started shaking in fear when I realized that this was The Big One, likely the start of WWIII, and that I might never see my boyfriend again. They were sending out messages to all military personnel to report to their bases immediately. People were covered with blood and ashes, people were jumping out of the Twin Towers to their deaths because of the fires and they couldn't get out.
In shock, I called my parents with whom I had a very strained, angry relationship at the time. Just like they teach us in EMT-Firefighter training, people tend to regress age-wise when they are in shock, fear, or under a great deal of stress. I felt like a little kid and I instinctively called my mom and dad because I thought they could help and make it better. Helplessly they said that they loved me too, that they didn't know what was going on, and they didn't know what was going to happen. I hung up and felt desperately sad for what was happening to all the people at the crash sites, and I felt desperately unsafe.
I got in my car and headed up to Ryan's. I was trying to get my sobs under control as I listened to NPR and drove fast. Everyone was in shock. I saw lots of other drivers crying. When I got there, I saw my boyfriend and his brother leaving the house. He had to go, and I gave him a hug goodbye. We watched them drive away. I wanted to grab him and hole up in a bunker somewhere in Canada. I did not want him to have to put his military training to any sort of use.
Ryan's girlfriend and I couldn't handle just sitting at home and feeling helpless because there was so much suffering and we wanted to do SOMETHING to help. I said, "Let's go donate blood, there's nothing else we can do." People were already queuing up at the petrol stations. By the time we got to the hospital the line was 8 hours long, the nurse told us. She said that since whole blood can't be kept very long, for us to come back in a few days or weeks. She said that there was a crush of people right now, but that we need to maintain the supplies later on.
The town that we were in had a relatively large Muslim population for the Midwest. Once news broke that it was a terrorist move, folks who wore traditional Muslim scarves or who looked Arab were hiding. And with good reason too, some racist fuck in Arizona killed a Sikh (dude, he's from India! Not Arabian! Stupid fuck!) gas station owner because the man wore a turban. Ridiculous. Some people were calling for retribution, and they were calling for Muslim or Arab blood, which I thought was awful. There were a few voices that said we needed restraint, and the rest were screaming for blood and revenge. I was terrified, I felt very vulnerable, and at the time I'm ashamed to say that at the time I wanted to bomb the shit out of the entire Middle East regardless of who was guilty of orchestrating the attack. The comparisons were being made to the earlier WTC bombings in the early nineties, and Al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility. I wanted law and order restrored, I wanted safety and medical care for everyone at the crash scenes, I wanted to donate some of my O-POS blood in the hopes that it could be sent out to NYC, and I wanted most of all to feel safe again. It was terrible.
Anyway, I coudn't handle watching the news. It was a nightmare. They kept showing the same footage over and over again. I tried to go to sleep because I was drained emotionally and physically, but every time I woke up it was like being jolted back into the same nightmare. I remember the boyfriend and I having a scared conversation in my car later that we should get married before he gets deployed.
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goodness. I was in 8th grade, in art class. a teacher of some kind came in, asked one girl to come outside. she came back in, sobbing. I'm still not sure what happened, as I don't remember hearing that anyone had died (that I knew)... I suppose her relative must have gotten out alright. My art teacher walked over and turned on CNN. I remember seeing the towers fall, but I suppose it wasn't live footage. My art teacher commented that the burning tower was one of the most striking images he had seen in his life. the rest of the day was kind of crazy. my mum came and picked me up from school, because she'd heard that school was going to be cancelled, but it wasn't. my brother and sister didn't know what had happened. I recall making a rather tasteless joke, which I will not repeat. It wasn't something actually offensive... it was just rather poor timing. I went home. Watched footage on the BBC, I was sick of hearing the same voices on CNN. but it was all the same anyway. went to a hobby shop to pick something up for a school project, but they were closed. terrified all day of hearing that something new had happened.
I think I remember when the pentagon was struck. Wasn't it about an hour later? I don't know. the timing is all very hazy. in the following days, I remember having the urge to punch a large number of people who joked about nuclear weapons (ie: retribution. turning the middle-east into a glass desert. "Lake Iraq.")
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Our phone rang at 7:45 a.m. It was one of the partners for my wife Laura's firm. I remember thinking why the fuck are you calling us at 7:45 on Tuesday morning; if this has anything to do with work, I'm going to drive over there and kick your ass, partner or not. Laura took the phone, and her end of the conversation went "Hello? What? What? Oh my GOD!" Laura worked in the ABC Towers in Century City, which are known locally as the Twin Towers. So the partner was calling to tell her not to come to work in case a similar plot was underway for Los Angeles.
She motioned for me to put the TV on, and there it was, the huge cloud of smoke over Manhattan. Where my father lived at the time. It took me a while to get hold of him; he told me that he had seen smoke coming from the WTC when he was driving out of the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel, but that was it.
Bad stuff. And since I live next to Al Qaeda Target #2, I'm not looking forward to the anniversary.
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I usually set my alarm clock to play music in the morning. I remember waking up and wondering what was up because no music was playing on my clock radio. Someone was talking and sounded agitated and they said that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
I got up and turned on my TV, and within a minute or two saw the second plane crash live. I had thought it was probably terrorism when I saw the first plane crash - it was a clear day and it's not like you can miss the towers. When I saw the second plane hit I heard the newscaster say the words "coordinated terrorist attack." It reminded me of the "airborne toxic event" from White Noise. I believe I said "Holy fuck*ng Christ!" out loud. It was surreal. I kept thinking to myself "This is something that happens."
I woke my dad to tell him that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I was angry and sad all day. We watched TV for the rest of the day, completely glued and not sure what would happen next. Those first couple of hours were surreal, especially watching the towers burn, watching people jump from the upper floors rather than burn to death, and then we heard about the other crashes into the Pentagon and the United 93 crash in western PA.
We watched the towers collapse and were comforted by Dan Rather. We called our family and friends. I left messages for those friends in New York City that lived or worked near the towers and hoped that I wasn't leaving a message that no one would ever hear.
By the end of the day I was exhausted, drained, still angry and upset, alternating between anger and tears for many hours straight.
I went out later that night and we noticed that there weren't any planes in the sky. Then we heard one or two - military jets cruising overhead.
As the events wound-down I felt another emotion other than anger and sadness: disappointment. I was disappointed that the "coordinated terrorist attack" wasn't harsher, broader, more deadly. It's not that I wanted more people to die or be hurt, but I couldn't help feeling "so that's it?" If the rapture came I'm sure I'd be thinking "I've seen better."
At the time we couldn't have known how 9/11 would affect history, or what would be coming. One thing I didn't feel was scared. I never felt like I was in any danger (it helps that Philly is such a shitty target), but I think I knew the world had changed that day.
Now five years later our government has given us more reasons to be angry and frustrated than the terrorists ever did. Osama Bin Laden ran the fuse, but the Bush administration pushed the bomb lever. The government used 9/11 to turn the United States into a fascist nation, and people are too etherized to do anything about it.
In the meantime, we invaded Iraq and are funding the decimation of Beirut in the name of ridding the world of terror, while producing more terror than any terrorist could ever have hoped for.
We can't win the war on terror because we've already lost. Visit any airport and you'll feel the terrorist effects personally.
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I was a junior in college and my firends birthday was the 10th, so we were all crashed out on couches and floors at her house. the phone rang and rang and we ignored it for at least half an hour due to hangovers. When we finally answered it, we were all up and gathered into the living room around the radio. I remember a reporter from NPR talking to some airline official. The reported was really frantic and angry; "What do you mean you're missing a fuck*ng plane?!"
When i got back home i went right downstairs to the bar, where there was a huge TV. I saw the towers fall and all everybody running all that dramatic footage and was amazed at the whole thing.
At the time I had an upside-down american flag hanging in my apt. window and i remember wondering if somebody might put a rock through it. I also remember looking out my window and seeing an Indian guy wearing a turban riding a bike down the street. I thought he must be pretty brave to even be out of his house.
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We can't win the war on terror because we've already lost. Visit any airport and you'll feel the terrorist effects personally.
Yes, flying after 9/11 sucks ass, but to be fair, I think that Americans were plenty naive about security for a long-ass time. Up through college, it was fun to go to the airport, like going to a mall (anyone who's been to Denver International Airport will know what I'm talking about, it's big and shiny and pretty like a mall). You could walk up to the gate, people didn't give much of a fuck, and they always asked you those silly, meaningless questions about if your luggage had ever been out of your sight. Not a big deal. Before September 11th, I had personally never heard of anyone getting molested by an Argenbright security guard, or about people having to take their shoes off to be searched, or even having their luggage searched unless they were going through security in a foreign country.
Prior to September 11th, friends of mine who went places like Italy were shocked that when they got off the airplane, there were soldiers standing there with assault rifles. Friends of mine who are Jewish and went to Israel were plenty used to arriving 5 hours early for an El Al flight. They don't fuck around in other countries that have been victims of terrorist attacks, and now we have to live with heightened security, and going to the airport is no longer a magical fun journey but one where you get searched and hassled for your ID.
I am hell of pissed about the liquids rule, now I'll have to pack my Marmite in my checked luggage and risk having to go a brekkie without it if my stupid ass suitcase gets lost.
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Yes, because if you have ONE BREAKFAST without Marmite then truly the terrorists have won.
The Israelis have been dealing with heightened airport security for years and they move people through Tel Aviv pretty quickly.
The no liquid rule is really stupid.
I didn't really talk about the anthrax scare (which really had nothing to do with 9/11 other than it happened shortly afterwards) or the idiotic Homeland Security Rainbow Alert system, which tells people that we're at a heightened state of alert but doesn't say what heightens it or what we should do differently.
Also, Arabs/Muslims don't wear turbans, people. Sikhs wear turbans.
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Yes, because if you have ONE BREAKFAST without Marmite then truly the terrorists have won.
Heh! That is why I <3 you, jough.
Also, Arabs/Muslims don't wear turbans, people. Sikhs wear turbans.
People are retarded, aren't they? I still can't believe that guy in Arizona shot another human being for the perceived sin of being Muslim/Arab, but it's just ridiculous to target someone simply because they have a turban. That just painfully highlights the stupidity for which Americans are renowned. I wish that we could stop living the Ugly American stereotype and disprove it. I wish there could be some kind of sea change for peace, as naive as that sounds.
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It alway amazes me how affected people were by those attacks. This is a good sign of human nature I think.
Personally I was getting ready to go to school and sit my year 11 physics exam that day, my best friend caled me and told me what had happened, I called him a a damn liar and turned on the tv. My family had visited the WTC a few years earlier so it was fairly real for us but after about 10-20 minutes of watching it we turned it off and just went about our day.
Everyone at school knew about it but we were busy with the exam y'know?
One thing that really depresses me is that your government seemed determined to be difficult regarding the attacks, just the length of time it took to release different information, just shipping a lot of the rubble away without a proper investigation (so I understand).
I realise it was terrible and people wanted to move on (and not have thousands of corpses in the middle of a city) but it just fuels the conspiracy machine.
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Reading Jough and Linnea's comments reminded me of something I experienced as a kid that is probably impossible nowdays.
Me and my mother were on our way from Amsterdam to Toronto in 1998, when I was ten. My mother was desperately afraid of planes, so she spent a good deal of time freaking out and using the air stewardesses as counselors. Anyway, after a certain point my mother started fixating on what kept the planes up and who was flying them. So, one of the air stewardesses decided that the best thing would be to show her. Me and my mother went to the cockpit and spent about twenty minutes there, talking to the pilots about how the plane worked and about flying in general. It was great fun for me and it did have a calming effect on my mom, but I really can't imagine this happening now. For all they knew, we could have been terrorists: if we had had guns and know how, it would have been possible.
Of course, people felt more relaxed on planes back then. I can't help think that if, for example, all drive by shootings happened at once in events a few times each decade instead of incident by incident, we'd be paranoid about who we let in cars.
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Yeah I did that too when I was a kid. Getting to look inside the cockpit is awesome, it seems a shame it wouldn't be allowed to happen today. It does seem like things are going a bit far though, I know we can't put a price on human life etc but there needs to be some sort of effectiveness vs. inconvenience spectrum, for instance outlawing all air travel would be almost 100% effective but would be terribly inconvenient, I think we need to make sure we do not get too close to this outcome.
If it were not against all sorts of laws I'd love to start my own airline where the only rule is that the pilot door locks at the beginning of the flight and no matter what it doesn't open again, even if someone slaughtered every cute little kid on board that door cannot be opened but you can bring on whatever you like. Our slogan would be "You're on your own."
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I was away from home. I'd been sent to my employer's office in Jackson, MS the previous day, and I'd stayed until about 11 fixing various problems and running various processes that can only happen when people aren't working. As per my usual routine for working in remote offices, I bought two new CDs for the trip, but I hadn't put them in on the way out. I groggily got up early, flipping on ESPN on the hotel TV while I showered. When I got out there was a live cut-in talking about how a 'small plane' may have hit the WTC.
I switched to a network while I got dressed, and watched as the local morning show got a feed of the burning tower. At that point they basically got off the air and let the New York studios handle it.
I still had a job to do, so I went to get breakfast at Chik-fil-A.
After breakfast I was walking back to my office through a 'skybridge' type system when I saw a TV in one of the offices with a lot of people crowded around. I paused outside the glass wall and watched the first tower fall; I guess it was live. The strangers inside stopped talking to each other. One lady was crying, I remember. I started feeling numb -- I knew this was a world-changing event, but I didn't want to admit that yet.
I got to work -- late -- and just started going through my trouble tickets, doing my best to resolve them because they just would have sent me back later. The secretaries were all nervous, because we were next door to the federal building. Even numbed, I remember thinking "Jackson fuck*ng Mississippi is probably not on the threat list," but I just nodded gravely. Most people either went home early or were staring out the windows.
Sometime during the day I realized I was just plain angry. Angry at having to be in Jackson, away from my family. Angry at whoever did this. Angry at the sensationalism that was already surrounding the news coverage. Angry that there were people willing to exploit this. Angry at the people on the call in shows demanding horrible things be done to 'those arabs.' I ended up clocking out at around 3 PM and starting the drive back home. I listened to radio coverage until I was out of range of the tower. I hated the news but couldn't stop until distance forced me.
I put in my new CD, All that you can't leave behind. I'd heard "Stuck in the moment" before, but something in it grabbed me that day -- I ended up listening to it and the title track over and over as I drove. It seemed to let some of the anger out.
When I stopped for gas in some exit-ramp town, there were a lot of people there, but I didn't think too much of it. When I got into cell-phone signal range again, I called my parents. My Mom was telling me that people were scared that there wouldn't be any gas, and the stations were jacking up prices ("Almost one eighty a gallon some places!"), and I'd better get a full tank because places were running out, and "OPEC might cut us off because of this." Mom listens to call-in shows. I tried to calm her down, but the rush at the gas station in East Nowhere, AL suddenly made sense.
By the time I got home, the anger, sadness, and numbness had all collected in a lump somewhere near my diaphragm. It took a few weeks for it to dissapate. I remember the hubbub over postponing the football season a week, because the NADA had booked the Superdome for the week after the Super Bowl. I remember the collective "is it okay to laugh again?" vibe that surrounded entertainment then. I remember The Onion's incredible work (http://www.theonion.com/content/index/3734), that seemed (to me, at least) to break the ice*.
Now, well, I'm not going to say the terrorists won, but it's tough to find someone that isn't an oil company or Haliburton that did win. I'm not going to point out anything but the irony that we were all concerned about gas that cost $1.80. The rest has been said more eloquently in a variety of forums. As bad as I thought it was then, I didn't imagine what would actually happen. I don't see how anyone could think the world is in a better position now. Great.
* Especially this article (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28151), which should be repeated more often.
(edit: fix'd link - side_show)
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I was in high school. Many kids figured the school was a possible target, being the largest Catholic high school in New York.
I took the bus home and it was extremely delayed. On the ride, I got a seat and fell asleep listening to the Chili Peppers's Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
The next school day was cancelled and on the first day back, there was a building-evacuating bomb threat. Missed hella class.
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That was a huge event, but at the time I really didn't care. My mom woke me up when the second plane hit and was freaking out. I calmed her down and went to school. As usual I skipped my AP History class, got high and smoked cigarettes. At lunch I got some food. After school I bought a bad Bob Dylan album and tried to buy the Strokes album (both came out that day). Then I went to guitar lessons and drove to the city to try to find the Strokes album. The guy at the record store said they had to ship them out because of New York City Cops, but he still had some vinyls. I didn;t have a record player then, so I went home.
The only reason I wrote all of this was to say that, in the 5th grade, the OKC Bombing happened. I was standing outside of my portable classroom when we heard a horrible explosion. About 20 miles away, the federal building had been bombed. This was a much more traumatic event, as at least 3 people I knew lost parents in this bombing. I ended up going to school with these people for like 13 years, that pretty much numbed me for the rest of my life. Realizing you heard like 168 people being killed is a pretty fucked up thing for a 12 year old.
I must say, I never really realized that when I saw the planes hit the towers that thousands of people were dying until about a year ago. That was a pretty weird thing to not realize, and when I did realize it, it affected me greatly, but nothing on 9/11 moved me to any emotional response. That happened later.
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I heard Carl Kasell on NPR announce the first attack, and turned on the TV to see the second plane hit live. Like Jough I thought "That was not an accident." The TV was so loud that my husband called down from upstairs "Is there a war going on down there or something?" and I said "Yes."
As long as I can remember I have had bad dreams of scary aircraft flying overhead. Now looking back they seem like some kind of future echoes even though I know this is silly. I have more of these dreams now.
When I go back to New York I take the train, and as you come close, you can see Manhattan out in the mists (I know, pollution) over the swamps of Jersey. This first time afterwards that I went, I couldn't find Manhattan in the distance, because the towers were gone. It was oddly frightening.
When I am there now, I am sometimes disoriented in a way that my best friend there first pointed out on that visit - When you get out of the subway and you don't know which way is which, you always used to be able to look for the towers to see which way is south.
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I drove by the Pentagon maybe 15 minutes before the plane hit it. I hadn't watched TV or listened to radio that morning, so I was blissfully unaware of what was happening in New York until I got to the office and someone said "Did you hear about the World Trade Center?" I wonder about people who were on that road right as the plane came in--I imagine pulling over, getting out of the car, and just staring, trying to make sense of what just happened.
By noon the company had said "Anyone who needs to be somewhere else, go." But because I was living back inside the Beltway, I couldn't really go anywhere, and before long I was the last one left on my floor. I just sat there refreshing news sites and my e-mail, as the "I'm OK" messages came trickling in from friends in New York. I even got an e-mail from an ex-girlfriend, who knew I worked as a defense contractor, worried that I'd been at the Pentagon. I did have one NYC friend and one guy I knew was working at the Pentagon who were unaccounted for, but I heard from them within a day or two.
Mrs. del Vaca eventually loaded up the cat and drove out to my office, and then we drove out to her dad's place another hour or so away and spent the night there.
A couple weeks later, they finally reopened Washington Boulevard, which runs past that side of the Pentagon, a road I normally took on the way home. Driving by and seeing this big gaping hole was, suffice to say, upsetting. A gas station on the other side of the road became a de facto viewing area; people would park there and then walk up an embankment to gawk.
Sadly, five years later, I have to say the terrorists did win. US out of Saudi Arabia? Check. Holy war with America in the Middle East? Pretty much. Americans scared shitless and acting irrationally? Yep. Disruptions to our way of life? To a degree. Actual safety improvements? Not enough, too much cosmetic junk that doesn't really help, but makes us think something is being done.
It makes me sad. Thanks to Lister for posting that Onion article, it's a good one.
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I have started a post in this thread about three or four times now.
Suffice to say, I still don't really know how I feel about it. I remember getting back from town, after lunch, and being told to turn the TV on, not long after the first plane had hit, and before people were sure what was going on. I then spent most of the rest of the day in some level of shock and bafflement. Basically just fuck*ng angry at people who will, well... kill other people. I think levels of despair at the way the government would deal with it were probably already seaping in as well. Call me a cynic!
I remember speaking to my ex, who I'd broken up with only a month or so previously. We weren't exactly in a place where talking was good, but that evening we had one of the least fucked up conversations we'd had in a long time, and for a good four years after, as our shit just didn't seem to matter.
I guess what I feel really unsure of is how I feel about everything since. Things like the way the families of the victims have been ignored through nearly every stage of the rebuilding process and the memorial, the reporting we are now failry used to and of course, as mentioned, the governmental reaction to it all. I'm also dismayed at how someone as apparently smart as Bin Laden, whose speeches, when translated correctly tell of a man sickened by the needless death of thousands caused in the rest of the world, will lash out as a terrorist and end the lives of thousands, something which is never fuck*ng justifiable, for fucks sake. That goes for you too, George.
If anything I feel like what grief I feel over the, fuck, thousands of people who died needlessly, has been tainted.
I also have a strange outlook on it just from having been close enough to feel, in every sense of the word, the Lockerbie bombing, and it's aftermath. My mother worked for the Disaster Support group who helped variously, for years afterwards, and gave me yet more insight and made it very personal. And seeing the shambles that came of the 'justice' sought, and the profound lies believed by the majority of those seeking recompense of some sort for the loss of their loved ones, made me sick for years just thinking about it. Thus, I can understand completely how I hope some people involved more personally with the WTC event might feel - lied to, used and paraded for the fuck*ng media.
I'm still not sure if I got across any of the myriad things that go through my head when I think about it. My feelings on it are most certainly quite complicated, but suffice to say, I am just sickened, and forever will be, at the deaths caused, and the way it can be manipulated and used to cause yet more. And the fact it has kicked off, as many of you have mentioned, this climate of fear where the terrorists win by default, just by causing such disruption that it's barely worth hoping for safety anyway.
Bruce Schneier's blog (http://www.schneier.com/blog/) often has a lot of incredibly smart things to say on the subject of the *cough* security measures being implemented and just how superficial they are, as well as it's success as far as terrorism is concerned.
Also, what I thought was a fantastic and touching The Show (http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/09/share_090706.html) from zefrank today.
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I was at work, doing some shitty data-input routine, bored out of my skull. It was pretty early in the morning (I'm not feeling like checking what's the time difference between NY and Rio, but I remember it being the start of a bright and hot day just like it was in NY). We work in a gallery/mall type of building, with several different types of services being offered in contiguous spacious rooms - dentists, travel agencies, electronic apparel etc (I work in a student exchange program) - , and at some point in the morning someone from a neighboring room entered our office and told people to turn the TV on, quick. At the time we had only one tiny TV atop a metal rack stuck on the wall of a small cubicle, so we all went there, kinda elbowing each other, trying to avoid spilling coffee from our small plastic cups. And you can only imagine the amount of noise we got mixed with our news, being so distant from the epicenter of the attacks.
At the time I had a little bit of trouble grasping the importance of the event. My bosses, who work with some exchange offices in America, and who constantly travel to the US to the point of having a lot of friends there, were the ones who first realised how horrific the whole scenario was. Me, I knew close to zero about the towers, about their importance and symbolic significance, even about their massive presence and role in NYC's history and landscape.
Everybody was talking about an accident, a plane hit, and there were we, watching a catastrophe unfolding live on TV like we already were used to, when the second plane appeared as a fast moving dot on the screen and slammed against the building before our eyes. We had nothing to compare that to, nothing to relate to it, it was just... for a while, for maybe one hour or two, as more mixed news came about cars exploding near the Capitol, a plane crashing on the **frigging Pentagon** and planes falling, we were just accepting the fact that it was the first strike, the beginning of all-out war against America. Everywhere I looked, dumb faces, mouths agape.
By the time the towers collapsed, it was already too much. We barely did any work for the remainder of the day. We basically followed the news, and called our partners in the US. I remember the internet that morning, one of the first things to pop up in forums and blogs and news sites was speculation as to why september eleventh, and people digging particular relevant dates in the Muslim calendar; as tragedy piled upon tragedy (the hit, the trapped people, the fall, those unfortunate firefighters's plight etc), some news sites going down under excessive traffic.
Strange that, for me, full comprehension only hit this year. Thanks again to TV. They are running some specials about the event on cable, and I caught that documentary "New York: A Documentary Film", which has two chapters about the twin towers - one for their rise, one for their fall. I can't help but be fascinated by stories of human hubris, and I learned as in under a spell about "man's biggest construction since the pyramids", about that little magickal act performed by Phillipe Petit, that supremely delicate moment when the towers had just been finished. It was just fantastic, and then it all made sense to me: the World Trade Center really was the World. Trade. Center, exactly what the name meant.
My personal belief is that certain acts and situations, being so vastly larger than the individual person's experience, can only be considered acts with magick properties. The foundation of buildings has an old history linking it with human sacrifices - it's powerful stuff. In the documentary, a famous photographer ponders about the towers which seemed to link water and the sky - powerful messages, powerful symbols; 9/11 was a friggin' tarot card as it happened, and it could only have touched very old psychic channels in all who watched/experienced it, briefly awakening all that pre-Enlightenment mythical crap about Babel (wasn't the WTC the great hub for globalization? I assume there were contracts being made up there in almost every language conceived; didn't the casualties' nationalities paint a broad gradient of colors and ethnicities?).
What drove the point home this time to me was that the documentary showed so much street scenes, it grounded the experience for me in a very potent way. As long as I was watching it, I was in the streets of New York, and what an altogether unpleasant place to be at that time...
And, at the same time, I cannot finish this amorphous rambling without mentioning something: As I watched the documentary, I couldn't help but wonder about the planning of the attacks. Down to its minimal details (shredded documents pouring over people's heads as in a mockery of the transactions that took place in those buildings; the killing of the first wave of firefighters; make your own list), it looked like the darkest type of genius straight out of a James Bond movie. The type of foreseeing and planning that couldn't leave anything to chance. And that type of almost oniscient planning could not have failed to spot one of the defining effects that the attacks would bring. I keep seeing this scene where some very hirsute, dirty men huddle in caves making sinister plans, and then one of them has this thought, this inevitable thought: "You now, I bet this thing is really gonna unite those guys". To a foreigner used to tales about the so-called New Yorker stolidness (which I assume it's a myth they take some pleasure in maintaining), few things are more awe-inducing (which means AWESOME) than the thought of that massive city railing itself with the most basic human purpose of aiding each other. I found the reports on how the city felt all of a sudden like this huge human space - where you could connect with a stranger crying in the subway, where people could volunteer to help sometimes with nothing more than buckets and the facade of urbanite irony was dropped for a while - very touching, the sense of people watching each other's backs.
In the end of the day, the 9/11 attacks were just a vicious backstabbing full of resentment - a tactical success, but a strategic mistake, which not only didn't advance Osama's cause, not by a longshot, but actually seems to have put a lot of the Muslim leaders against Osama Bin Laden, whom now they blame for letting loose a 600 pound gorilla on their backs -, the type of thing that makes one think of Lex Luthor throwing dirt at Superman's eyes, out of spite and without the resources to actually bring him down. Kindergarten terror tactics, only with a bigger budget and total lack of moral restraints.
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Woke up this morning, I remember thinking how I was up way earlier than five years ago.
I was walking into work at about the same time as the first tower was hit.
Made some tea. On my desk the local paper's front page's head line reads "More than half of Canadians blame U.S. foreign policy for 9/11." I was feeling sort of melancholy and didn't have the energy to actually read the paper. I avoided work and read up on information about my up coming trip. I was handed a work-related documentary I had a four hour window in which to watch and return it. I sat alone and watched this Holocaust documentary ( Hana's Suitcase if any of you know the book). Watching a grown man cry, seeing the piles of suitcases, the piles of shoes, the piles of hair. I kept myself from crying but sort of felt fragile all day. My coworker came in and I cheered up, we goofed around, then started talking about the anniversary. Got home, watched Condi Rice speaking live in Halifax about "evil in the world" - got annoyed that that sort of simplified jargon is for He-man movies, not real life. Ate some cheesecake, worked on a grant application.
I can't say anything's gotten better since that day, five years ago, but I can list so many things that have gotten worse. I like my checks and deposits to balance, you know? I like a delicate balance. I want to believe in the possibility of a better world. Of tolerance. But sometimes, I just don't know. On the bus today, a skinny brown skinned man of ancestry I was unsure of got on, and the lady sitting on the outside seat with the only inside seat unoccupied did her best to ignore him at the bus jostled and he struggled to stay standing, but wouldn't move for him to sit. He looked at her hopefully, but said nothing as she ignored him and gave up. I smiled at him and motioned at the half empty seat next to me, and the business man one seat over looked annoyed that he had to move his trench coat. The man nearly fell into the seat as the bus turned a corner. I swear I felt him radiate relief sitting there - the driver was one of those guys who rides the brakes hard. I rang the bell, the bus driver slammed the breaks for my stop so I sort of half-ran to the front going with momentum to keep from falling over, got off. The man smiled shyly at me through the window as the bus pulled past me. I thought for a moment that maybe he had sad eyes though he was smiling, but his face was blurred as the window reflected the sky. I was tempted to mouth "I'm so sorry," I don't know exactly why, but instead I just smiled shyly back, our eyes connected, or maybe it was the sky again, and the bus drove off. And all I could think is "I'm so sorry."
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The bit that still baffles me si that our governments seem happy to buy into our enemy's propaganda. Al Quaida and Jama Islamia etc. (spelling is for suckers) have about as much to do with Islam as the KKK and the war in Iraq have to do with Jesus. It's pure propaganda on their part used to sway over otherwise reasonably but religious human beings, or at least convince them to turn a blind eye. Our governments insisting that it's all tied back to Islam is just doing their job for them. We should be re-inforcing at every turn that this has nothing to do religion and everything to do with politics and power, terrorists don't care what religion we are, they care about where our military bases are and what countries we are imposing trade sanctions on, unfortunately while this is acknowledged from time to time it seems to be little more than lip service.
Gosh! (napoleon dynamite mood)