9/11 2001 (pic heavy)

[deer of the dawn]

I was at work in an office, and when someone said "a plane hit the WTC" I said "a plane hit the Empire State Building in the 1930's" and went about my work. Someone tried to get the news on the intarwebz but of course CNN was jammed. Pretty soon no one was working, people were walking around wringing their hands and finally the Grand Poobah called everyone down to the auditorium for a prayer meeting. I worked till noon and went home and turned on NPR news (we didn't have TV, and I was and am glad-- it was too crazy). I called my mother because my stepdad worked just a block away from the WTC. Turns out he was going in late, as usual, saw I-95 jammed and went home, thank God. I don't think he would have survived the stress (as it was he lived till just this summer).

It was almost a year before I could actually look at the pictures (I lived in the Adirondacks and was media-deprived, not always a bad thing) and a couple of years before I watched footage. What I saw was the documentary about the firefighters-- they were filming a "day-in-the-life" thing and they were checking out a gas smell in the street when suddenly everyone looks up, the camera pans up, and there goes the first plane POW, and the world changes.

I also did not know a soul who died that day, despite the fact I lived in upstate NY and had grown up in Western CT.

[lorin]

Bump because we should never forget.........and we're forgetting.

[aliantha]

I thought about it today when I looked out the window at lunchtime. Sure enough, the sky was a clear, brilliant blue.

[sgt.null]

we have moved on as a country. whatever unity we felt has calcified into a bitter division. we seem deadlocked and lost. we condemn Israel for defending herself. our own president tells us Isis is not Islam, even though it's right there in the name. the left blames everything on Bush. the right obsesses over who sleeps with who. we enter war after war. our civil rights erode evermore each day.

we are worse than we were that day. and I don't know how we correct it.

[lorin]

we have moved on as a country. whatever unity we felt has calcified into a bitter division. we seem deadlocked and lost.

yep, you are so right.

I can't seem to let it go like others have. It feels personal. Especially the pic of the firefighter 28 walking up the stairs.

It haunts me.

[michaelm]

To me it always feels like the anniversary of the passing of a loved one is coming up as we approach the date each year. It's ingrained in my memory in the same way, even though anyone I know who was lost that day was not a direct acquaintance.

Both of my wife's parents are New Yorkers and at the time she was living in NH and I was traveling between the US and the UK each month, but living with her in NH. We could drive to Manhattan in a little over 4 hours and did so often (often parking at her great uncle's condo in Brighton Beach and then getting the subway in to Penn St).

On September 10 2000, I was in New York with time to do some of the tourist things I had never done. I went to Battery Park to take the ferry to Liberty Island, but when I saw the lines I decided I didn't want to do it. Turning away from the ferry lines, the skyline was dominated by the twin towers. I took the Subway to the station under the towers, and walked up to street level. I took photos of them and a few things around there, then went into one of the towers (the one with the large antenna) and asked if it was possible to go to a high floor as a visitor. They told me that I couldn't in that building, but I could in the other, so I went to the other and there was a security line for visitor to go to the observation deck.

No one was in line. The Liberty Island ferry line was ridiculous and earlier I had seen the line for the Empire State Building spilling out on to the street. No one seemed to care about visiting the towers though. I went through security and took the express elevator to the 106th floor.

The guy who operated the elevator was just a kid - he was cracking jokes as we went up (me, two British women and a quiet American couple), mostly about how he had never seen this huge elevator get filled. He seemed to really enjoy his job, and of everyone who may have been lost that day, he is probably the person I think about most.

When we got out of the elevator we exited to the right and walked into the observation deck, which was half of the 106th floor. In retrospect, what amazed me most was that the walls just outside the elevator showed the structural designs of the building. If any of those responsible had gone here, they could have seen all of the details of the contruction shown on the walls.

The view from there was amazing. We were high above the Hudson and looking down on to the roofs of other tall buildings. You could see for miles, and it was much better than looking through the 3 inch gaps between bars on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. There really weren't that many people there, and many of them were just sat drinking coffee as there was a small coffee bar there.

On one side were the escalators to the roof, which was a huge bonus I had not expected. They doubled back on themselves a couple of times to take us above the 110th floor. Exiting to the roof was a phenomenal experience that I can't imagine ever seeing again. The roof was flat with a barrier around it, an electric fence on the other side, then razor wire. I'm not sure I can describe what the view was like without writing way too much, but it was amazing. I asked one of the security guards to take a photo of me with the Brooklyn Bridge and the one next to it (can't remember the name of it. Manhattan Bridge?) - I think I have it at home, so I'll scan it and post it in this thread.

Anyway, a year later on September 4 2001 I was in Logan airport to take an 8:35am flight to the UK. A couple of weeks later I realized that I had been there at the same time as the highjackers on what was either their reconnaisance of the airport or an aborted attempt.

So when September 11 dawned I was in the UK. I had been working from home and suddenly my internet connection became sluggish just after midday. I checked a couple of web sites to see if I could find anything but my connection was really slow. I checked the news and pages just wouldn't load. Thought I'd take a break so I went to the kitchen to make a sandwich and then turned on the TV while I ate. I was seeing news that a plane had hit one of the towers, and within a few seconds news was coming through live that a second plane had hit.

The rest of the day was a blur. I was so distant and the one person I wanted to be with was my wife (my girlfriend back then). We emailed during the day and then talked on the phone when she finished work. I don't think either of us did any more work for the rest of that day.

At the start of December 2001 I was back in the US. We traveled to New York to pay our respects. My brother-in-law (married to my wife's step sister) was a volunteer fire fighter out on Long Island, but he had lost many people he knew that day, and my father-in-law had been born across town on the Lower East Side. It was very near to her and to me too.

We took the subway towards Ground Zero and got off at the last station heading downtown that was still open. As we walked towards Ground Zero we both noticed the smell in the air - it reminded me of a construction site where a brick house had been demolished and it had been rained on. As we walked we also noticed that there was tiny pieces of somethat black blowing around in the light breeze. It was eerily quiet. As we got nearer we felt the need to not speak, not even in a whisper and I think everyone else we encountered felt the same.

We neared the site from the north, and moved to the low barriers where other people were quietly gathered. We were next to the small church that was constantly being mentioned in the news as a "miracle" in that it hadn't had any windows broken. Standing there I realized why - it was so sheltered by other buildings, including a much taller building that stood between it and the towers that it would have been a miracle if anything had hit it at all.

Standing next to me was an older, grizzled man in a navy veteran baseball cap. He seemed to be holding something in, and he suddenly turned his head to me and blurted out "If I could get hold of the bastards who did this I'd tear them to pieces!" He had tears in his eyes that he was struggling to hold in.

We walked to the avenue on the eastern side of the site where it was much more crowded, and really the rest was just silence other than the traffic and seeing so much anger and sadness from the people around us.

I'll dig that photo out of me on the roof and post it here.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

we have moved on as a country. whatever unity we felt has calcified into a bitter division. we seem deadlocked and lost. we condemn Israel for defending herself. our own president tells us Isis is not Islam, even though it's right there in the name. the left blames everything on Bush. the right obsesses over who sleeps with who. we enter war after war. our civil rights erode evermore each day.

we are worse than we were that day. and I don't know how we correct it.

We don't...at least not by doing the things we are doing. The same thing happened after Vietnam, as you recall--we fought with ourselves more than we did with anyone else.

We won't start to get over it until all the fallout from 11 Sept is undone. End the Patriot Act. End the AUMF. End warrantless wiretaps. End the current military actions in which we are engaged. Get rid of the TSA. None of these things have made us any safer, only more inconvenienced and less free than we were 13 years ago.

What is going to happen when the next inevitable terrorist attack happens here, despite all those "security" measures? It isn't a question of "if" but "when and where". What will we do in response to that attack, hm?

[michaelm]

To me it feels strange that we are where we are with regard to post-9/11 changes.

I have dual citizenship (US/UK) as I was born in the UK but am a naturalized US citizen. I grew up through the 1970s and 1980s (and to some extent in the first half of the 90s) in the UK where terrorist attacks from Northern Irish paramilitary groups were a part of life.

They could strike anywhere, in any way, and it was always unexpected. The main difference is that the terrorism there was not from people with a different language and a different religion - it was from people with a slightly different accent and the same (more or less) religion (although probably more religious than most people in England).

The reactions were not anywhere near the same as in the US, with most of the post-attack strategy being to train the military, police and public to be more vigilant. After one attack in the early 90s many public places like major airports and train stations had their metal trash cans removed (after a bomb was placed in a tall cast iron trash can in a pedestrianized shopping area). The only result of that bomb was to kill 2 children - I still remember the name and the face of one of them - Tim Parry - he was running from the blast of a first bomb and then the second went off when he was right next to the trash can. I still recall going to airports in the mid to late 90s and being expected to throw my trash on the floor for one of the army of cleaners to sweep up.

It still seems to me that even after the day of bombing in London in 2005 it didn't not elicit the response of the US after 9/11. There seems to be a much more vociferous and mobilized response to unpopular political decisions and perhaps that is why it was easier in the US to implement an unconstitutional response.

Anyway, just my 2c.

[aliantha]

we have moved on as a country. whatever unity we felt has calcified into a bitter division. we seem deadlocked and lost. we condemn Israel for defending herself. our own president tells us Isis is not Islam, even though it's right there in the name. the left blames everything on Bush. the right obsesses over who sleeps with who. we enter war after war. our civil rights erode evermore each day.

we are worse than we were that day. and I don't know how we correct it.

We don't...at least not by doing the things we are doing. The same thing happened after Vietnam, as you recall--we fought with ourselves more than we did with anyone else.

We won't start to get over it until all the fallout from 11 Sept is undone. End the Patriot Act. End the AUMF. End warrantless wiretaps. End the current military actions in which we are engaged. Get rid of the TSA. None of these things have made us any safer, only more inconvenienced and less free than we were 13 years ago.

What is going to happen when the next inevitable terrorist attack happens here, despite all those "security" measures? It isn't a question of "if" but "when and where". What will we do in response to that attack, hm?

I can't argue with anything you've said.

[michaelm]

What puzzles me more than anything is why there hasn't been another attack. We spend all our effort on defending our southern border and making sure that people don't bring deodorant onto planes, but I doubt that's going to deter any terrorist with at least half a brain.

I seriously doubt that it's because the CIA or NSA or whoever it is has done an exemplary job...

[Cagliostro]

I suspect it is because the shadow government hasn't had to cover up anything else since then. They're in it with the aliens, ya know...

Where's my tinfoil hat?

[sgt.null]

I was in NYC back in 1989. walked by the towers on our way to battery park.

[Harbinger]

It was the first thing I thought of when I opened my eyes on the anniversary this year and that is unusual. One, I rarely awaken 100% with clarity and two, I am pretty sure there have been at least two anniversaries on which I didn't think about it until someone mentioned it.

[DavidJones]

I remember being in school, when it happened. I wonder if we'll ever know the full truth.

[aliantha]

Welcome, DavidJones! Feel free to head up to the Summonsing and say hi!

[michaelm]

Glad someone posted here - it reminds me that I still haven't taken out my photos of me there in 2000 and scanned them.

[lorin]

bump 'cause I never forget. When you forget it happens again. And right now we need some reminding of atrocity. The atrocious can sneak up on us in many disguises.

9/11/15 passed without my bump. It makes me sad and I feel like apologizing....but to who(m)?

[aliantha]

It's been all over my Facebook newsfeed today. I've been avoiding Facebook because of it...

[lorin]

It's been all over my Facebook newsfeed today. I've been avoiding Facebook because of it...

And yet here you are on this thread
You are an enigma, wrapped in a riddle.

[aliantha]

Just clearing the orange dot tree. (shrug)