9-11 Memories

Where were you on that ominous day? That day when you became unsure and uncomfortable. That day when others saw you in a different way. That disastrous day when your foundations were shaken, your daily life altered, and your freedom challenged. That day when the world was shocked by the news. The news that brought your life to a screeching halt. The news that spread to audiences all around the world. The audiences that were afraid. And the ones that were shocked. And the ones who did not know what to think. The audience that felt like an infinitesimal seed ready to explode into a colossal tree. The audiences who did what they normally did on that ill-omened day. Were you doing what you normally did? They did. They thought so too. What were you doing when the people cried in one voice? You are not the only one in the world who cried out on that day and still cry. But cries continue to be unanswered. What were you doing on that day?



The alarm clock rings. Six-Thirty AM had come and I wished for a few more minutes of sleep. My wish was granted momentarily. Shortly after, I was awoken by my mother.



Surreally, I walk to the bathroom. I was out of shaving cream so I used soap as a substitute. I really didn’t need to shave much back then, I was only 16. Maybe once every week. After I was done, I wiped my face with a towel and began putting on my school uniform. I couldn’t find my belt. It was somewhere in my closet. Found it. Grabbed my backpack and placed it near the door. It was now 6:50 AM. A quick Toaster Strudel breakfast and a glass of milk were excellent. The carpool should be here any moment now.

Its 7:30 now, and I’m finishing some last minute homework in the car and listening to the radio. The other people in the car were doing the same thing. Both reading and writing in a moving car gave me headaches, so I stopped.



The white van pulled up in front of school. It was almost 7:55 AM and I was rushing to get my books and get to class. I got in the main door, and looked back. The van was still there. Usually the carpool drivers take off right after they drop us off. He was looking at the radio confusedly. I shrugged and hurried to my locker, changed my books, and headed to English class. I was set. Or so I thought.



English class was as usual. Mr. Nelson doesn’t take himself seriously at all. So reading a poem about geese, made class interesting that day. I didn’t like poems. I only liked the ones that meant something to me; I didn’t care for the ones that I couldn’t understand. It was now 8:50 and class ended at 8:55.Then the intercom beeped. Mr. Nelson was in the middle of his goose impression and he starts to quack at the intercom. The beep was an ordinary one that I had grown accustomed to and therefore ignored. Yet now it pierces my mind with intense clarity. It was that beep that signified a significant change in my life.

It was our Principal.

I don’t remember if he said good morning. I’m sure he did but I wasn’t paying attention.

Then I heard “Today we have tragic news”.

This was truly awkward; the Principle usually doesn’t interrupt a 1500 student body for just ordinary news.

“At approximately 8 AM this morning, there were two massive explosions at World Trade Center in New York. We don’t know any details yet.”



The rest of the day was a blur. Didn’t know what to think. People were coming up with a wide range of theories. I don’t remember any of my classes. At home I turned on the TV, the first thing I noticed was the immense coverage of this event. Even Food Network had cancelled all its programs and displayed a small message offering its sorrow on the events.





In history that day is known as September 11, 2001. In my memory this day was not September 11, it was just That Day. The day when my life changed both negatively and positively. The day when all my life seemed to shrink right in front of me. I was never treated the same after that day.





It changed my life...........Forever.

-Equilibrium


Thats my story, how about you guys?

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Δύο άτομα. Μια μάχη. Κανένας συμβιβασμός.

Dont mean to sound insenitive but thats a pretty dramatic post about 9-11. Did you write this before you posted it here? Its pretty good, you should do some more creative writing.

I think 9-11 will be the "Where was you when kennedy died" memory of our era. i can remember exactly where i was.

It was the september just before i was about to start university and a couple of days after my birthday which was on the fourth. so i was in our local high-street (Just a long row of shops outside, kinda like an outside mall.) doing some shopping with SisboomBah and another friend at about 2 in the afternoon. We was in Dixons, an electronic shop and as we walked out the door, dispalyed on the TV's in the shop window wwas the news with some images of a building on fire. As i walked past i caught a glimpse of the Tv and it said the Pentagon under an image of the burnig building, so we all stopped at stared at the silent TV and waited to see what was next. then all of a sudden the images of the twin towers came on screen and we just couldnt believe it. We rushed back in the shop and stood with a bunch of the staff just watching the television. it was like some horror story or film, we just couldnt understand how it happened. Then all of a sudden whilst we were all standing there throwing ideas around, one of the buildings collapsed. Right on live tv in front of our eyes. A couple of women standing with us just gasped and put their hands over their mouths, eyes wide with astonishment. It was awful. then the news readwers came on and started to explain everything they knew. they started saying about another plane was heading towards the White House and there maybe more. I remember we all ran out the shop and started to make our way home as quick as we could.

I know it sounds insensitive, but it was exciting, everyone was wondering if there was a plane heading towards London or anywhere else. People just wanted to get to a televsion set and watch the news unfold. It sounds incredibly insensitive i know, but for a lot of us over here in the UK, it just seemed so unbelieveable. Like some horrible mockumentary. It wasnt until the newspapers the next day showed the images of the people jumping out of the windows adn the terrible final moments of the towers that it became horribly sad and real. that whole night i was having a borad game night with some friends before we all went to university, and we all litterally sat up all night watching the tv with reports from America.

Never forget that day.

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Pumpkins scream in the DEAD of night!

I wrote it a while back, I sat down and decided that I needed to write it down before I forgot it. So its been a while and I decided to share it with you guys.

Sweden is six hours ahead of New York time so it was afternoon here. I had just come home from university class where we had watched Independence Day. When I got home I turned on the tv and it was mad. I remember feeling the adrenaline pumping in my veins, a weird combination of fear and excitement. I think that is a pretty common reaction in situations where you sense true danger. I remember being 100% sure of that this was the start of World War III. I texted my then roomie to tell him all about it but he thought I was joking and didn't believe me before he came home and saw it on tv. I remember thinking it was the Palestines or perhaps some weird sect from within USA. I had never heard of Al Quaida and Osama Bin Laden didn't exactly ring any bells when his name was mentioned after a while. I spent the whole day and evening in front of the tv and I remember I was arguing, almost fighting, with my friends about different things like who was behind it, those fake pictures of celebrating palestinians on the streets, the consequences of it all and so on. The next day our head teacher told us that he was sorry that they had shown a catastrophy film like Independence Day the same day as the attack and that it wasn't proper. We discussed in class what impact this would have on Hollywood and I also participated in a silent minute ceremony.

I never felt any sadness or grief that day. It was more like as I said before that I was on "alert" so to speak. But one year after when watching the memorial ceremony on Ground Zero the human aspect of the tragedy struck me like a blow in the face, and I cried like a baby. Not that I hadn't reflected on the tragedy of the families and friends of those who died that day but I think I had been too busy looking at this from a global political point of view. I think that was when they showed pictures of all the firemen that died on 9-11 to the tunes of "Danny Boy". I will never forget that moment and the sadness I felt...

9-11 is without a doubt the event that has been and still is affecting this time era the most.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

So True. Yeah, 9-11 did have alot of effects, immedialtly 3 or 4 big budget movies were either cancled or reworked (and thats just the immediate non-political side).

actually i didn't see it, rather i heard it on the radio after the fact..at lunchtime i passed by a bar showing the fall of the twin towers on tv..but didn't actually see anything until i got home from work

my husband worked 30 blocks from the wtc and climbed up onto the roof of his building and took some great shots..but it took him three hours to get out of there...he was lucky a van picked him up and brought him home, but all the trains stopped running and the entire city was shut down...

i picked him up from where the van dropped him off and he brought me down to a spot where you could see the skyline of new york, where the twin towers always held a prominent place..on this day, those two buildings had been replaced with a thick yellow smoke that you could see from everywhere for weeks afterwards, never mind the smell... my first thought was that it looked like a volcano had erupted...

the fire lasted for six months before it was put out entirely...

the thing that really struck me was that i went to that spot on an interview two months beforehand...i stood next to the buildings and mingled with some of the employees...needless to say, i didn't get the job, but it was scary nonetheless

Being I worked for Boeing at the time, an ulitimately lost my job about it, how do you think I feel?

Nothing like seeing something you built with pride being used as a missile against your own country.

I worked on the 757 in final assembly the time of the attack.

I had to go into work that day.

I remember walking under that beautiful new airplane, I thought I was going to cry.

Boeing is going to end production on the 757 this year.

But I shouldn't complain.

I didn't die that day, and know one I knew died.

My heart goes out to those who lost friends or family.

Equilibrium, if your post is a joke, you're an *******!

What?

Honestly, man... Why should it be a joke?

No idea where he got that from...

I wouldnt take it personally Equillibriumadum. I think with the subject of 9-11 not all of the answers are gonna be nice and reflecting. its a tough subject, a lot of epoles lives canged that day and some were effected much more worse than others. so prepared for some extreme replies

Thats ok, just don't direct those extreme replies at me, I didn't do it. But yeah, people should be able to say whatever they want on here.

You haven't lived through the Django era, so eventhough I know where you're coming from...there is such a thing as good and bad taste, and what's acceptable to keep a nice community without continueal anger and angst. We all have different opinions on subjects, issues and movies...which makes for interesting discussions...heck, just read some of the debates ...but to say "people should be able to say whatever they want on here"...welll....Django used to say that and then insult people for their opnions....there's more to it... Just giving you some background, that's all.

As blibby said, 911 is a pretty emotional subject for some, so I wouldn't take Loner's remark to heart. A few months after 911 I was surfing the web looking at different message boards and was pretty disgusted by a few sick people that had the bad taste to make jokes about it.



Now back to the subject...

I had just dropped off the kids at school when I heard about the first airplane hitting. As soon as I got home I I turned on the TV...and called my mom...my grandmother (88yrs at the time) lived two blocks from the WTC. We both tried calling her nd our other relatives in NYC...all the lines were down. The entire day I just watched the news and cried. we didn't hear about my grandmother until late that night. Luciky she was fine. Turned out when she herad the first plane crash she went to the top of the building and saw the second place crash. They evacutaed her building...they were supposed to go to battery park, but she was too slow and was brought into the basement of another building and was helped by a nice young man from sweden.

Anyway...that night she was helped by a nice woman who made sure she was in the hands of one of my cousin's. She was ok...just shaken to the bone. We all got the news about her around 10:00pm. For the next three days I watched the news and cried. I couldn't help but feel for the families of the people that were lost...and the stories that coming out.

My mom got her to visit us a month later...she kept saying was, 'it was unbeliveable' over and over...and would get very emotional talking about it.

Also...we found out a few days after 911 that my cousin was suppose to be on the plane that went down in P.A. He changed his ticket at the last minute. I believe his decision really affected him afterwards.

Oh no, thats not what I meant at all. I just meant that you can convey your opinion on something without being afraid someone will disagree with you,or hate you for it. As long as you don't insult someone for their opinions, you should be able to convey yours.

I was in my second week of year 10 at School. I started School the Tuesday before, the 4th... I will always remember the little things from around that time, I can't even remember the date I started College back in last September!

It was 1:00PM English time if i'm not mistaken, when the first plane hit the WTC. I found out at about 1:30, as we was all going back to lesson from our dinner hour and everybody who went home for there dinner told everyone about it. I remember feeling nothing, not a thing, I didn't feel upset, nothing. All afternoon, that's all people talked about, the people who saw it on the news were just asked question after question.

I got home at about 3:30, and I remember walking in and my sister had it on Sky News, and the image of the WTC with smoke and flame pouring out of the top of the building was on. I sat down to listen to what had happened and listen to the reasons behind it. That's all I watched for hours, I must of watched Sky News more then ever that week. After seeing the images of it though, thats when it hit me, how it actually did take me from feeling nothing about the whole incident, to feeling deeply appalled and upset for the people who died and the friends and family of those who did. People tried to defend the actions of the terrorists, even at my School, a few Muslims were really annoyed how people were going on about 9/11 but don't even stop to think about the people who died in the middle east due to Americans... a point perhaps, but thats the world we live in; people don't really feel such pain or grief when you hear of an attack eg suicide bombing etc in the middle east but feel so saddened when it happens in more 'civilised' countries.

This really is the "where was you..." of our generation.

Very very true.

Except for all the different images of WTC in flames, the planes crashing into it and the collapse of the enormous buildings along with people fleeing in panic, there are a couple of images that are stuck to my memory forever probably.

The first one is the image of that man that decided to jump from the burning building. That got to me so deeply and I get tears in my eyes when I think about him. He looked like a leaf in the wind and I can only imagine what he felt... To come to the conclusion that the best thing in that moment to do was to jump to a certain death. That made me realize how small but extraordinary one life is at the same time...

The other image I remember very strongly is a black man, his suit all covered in dust, being interviewed by some reporter right after the collapse of the buildings (I think that's when it was anyway). I don't remember his exact words but he kept thanking and prasing Allah for keeping him alive. The man was a muslim. That was so symbolic to me and I remember thinking about how absurd it all was. I knew that muslims in general would be blamed for this but this man proved that it is so much more complicated than that.

Someone told me about it all while we were talking on MSN, and I didn't actually react to it, because I didn't know where the WTC was [or what it meant and would mean]. I mean, you heard just as much about terrorists before 9/11 as after it [or at least, we did here in Australia] and so I really just assumed that something terrible had happened in a Middle Eastern or African country.

The next morning was my birthday, and my Dad came in to wake me up. Now, I'd heard about 9/11 very, very late the previous night, remember [time zones, people, time zones], and while I knew all about it, he had only just heard.

"Terrorists flew into the twin towers in New York!"
"Mm, I know."
"You know?! How would you know?"
"I dreamt about it."
"Oh, my God!"

And I subsequently led him on like that for roughly a day and a half.

To be honest, I was actually rehearsing a play at this point in my life and we were merely two days away from going on stage. It meant very little to me for a relatively long time. To be honest, things only started to make sense to me later, when bin Laden's name started to come up in the press, and then again when Bush started talking about mounting a "War on Terror".

The terrorist bombings in Bali in the October of 2002 had a far greater impact on me, personally. Firstly, I'd been to Bali only two years earlier, and the bombs went off in the general area that we'd been staying, and secondly, of course, 9/11 had made us all more aware of such events.

What surprises me is that, of all the American exchange students I spoke to at my University last semester, not one of them [not even the most intelligent and up-to-date] knew about the incident in Bali. To be honest, I was actually sort of disgusted.

However, that aside, for me, the three major events of the new millennium have been 9/11, the Bali Bombings and the capturing of Saddam Hussein. I don't mean that these are the three major events that will be remembered by history or anything, I just mean that if my children ever ask me where I was for something, these are the three events I'll be able to give a one hundred percent accurate answer for.

1. On the computer, in my home, talking to a friend on MSN.
2. In my living room, on my younger brothers' birthday, while it was raining outside.
3. On my laptop, in the study, listening to the television in the other room.

So, anyway, yeah. That's my bit.

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www.esotericrabbit.com

Can't believe you were in bali just 2 years earlier. That must be surreal.

It's not like I was thinking, "That could have been me," or anything, but the fact of the matter is that I just knew how big a deal it was going to be for the Balinese themselves. I know that what happened in New York was a tragedy, and in terms of the loss of human life, probably a greater one than which took place in Kuta. But for those of us who know about Bali and the way that it's become overly dependant on tourists, there was an added tinge of melancholy, knowing that just as many people were going to be touched by this event as were touched by 9/11.

And yet who was going to declare a war on South-East Asian terrorism? A whole lot of nobody, that's who.