Do you remember 9/11? or would you rather not?

[Tears of Lys]

My instincts are to look at every September 11th as my brother's birthday, as I used to.

I don't want to be angry, horror-stricken, and filled with sorrow every year this day. Maybe you were too young to live through it. Be glad if this is so.

We lost a lot of lives on that sunny day. And in the years afterwards, I'm afraid we've lost a lot more.

[drawkcabi]

I remember it. I remember sitting in front of my TV all that day, in denial at first  then shocked, scared, horrified, all those emotions. 

 

Because it happened I don't ever want to forget, it would just seem disrespectful somehow. The only way I'd want to forget is if the whole day could be erased from history and the towers were still standing.

[Ixodes]

I had recently moved to Minnesota and was working that day. My parents were driving up from Ohio to visit my new home for the first time. I remember reading online that a plane crashed into the WTC. I was thinking a small plane or something along those lines. The Internet stopped working shortly thereafter.

Then the receptionists kept coming back to the treatment area with reports from the radio. Things just got worse and worse as the truth came out. I kept squeezing in news updates in between my appointments. My parents started calling from the road. They shut down the highway going into Minneapolis and they were sitting on the side of the road. We finally routed them around the city so they could make it up to my house.

We spent that visit watching TV, images of people jumping from burning skyscrapers and such. I went into work each day and the caseload got fewer and fewer. Each night I would come home and instead of doing stuff with my mom and dad, we would sit by the news. Hell of a week, introducing my folks to my new life.

[Jace, Extat]

I was sixteen years old and I remember that we all got sent home from school shortly after the truth of what was happening hit us. I also remember later that day that my bestest friend in the whole world put his head in my lap and cried for hours. The only feeling of my own that I recall is a terrible emptiness in the place where I'd before believed in the future. My own tears wouldn't come until they started showing the people jumping out of windows to escape the flames.

[Littlefingers In The Air]

Too many people died that day for me to simply forget.

[serdog]

It remember the terror of that day the very real fear of death. I was living in a location that had false alam on 9/11 (We had two 747 landing which were reporting high jack signals and were stromed by armed RCMP), so it odd for me that I will think of those who died  that panic will always be at the forfont of my mind

[polishgenius]

I remember it. I don't mark it in any particular way, though.

[BLU-RAY]

I grew up in a place that was a bedroom community for NYC, my dad worked in New York near the WTC, and most of my peers' parents worked in New York - and I was interested in politics and foreign policy to a significant extent at the time (that was freshman year of high school).  I think my first reaction was some sort of incoherent rant about the competence of the intelligence community.  Plus, that was back before CNN and the various cable news channels had turned into the abject farces they are now, and so once we got home from school, it was just wall-to-wall coverage of the incident. So that day was a big, big deal - they went around to classrooms to let us know our parents had checked in and were alive.  If nothing else, I remember the relief I felt when they told me my father had checked in.  It was an unpleasant day, and really an unpleasant locus in time - the train stations with cars where no one came back, etc. kind of stuck with me for a while.

 

My dad saw the first building collapse while on the phone with someone at work from his office window.  Not good times. I'm sure the boarders who lost people or were living in the city at the time had a worse time of it than I did, but it was something that stuck with me.

[Jo498]

I was hiking in the Alps between Italy and France, so at first heard only rumours that were horrid enough (often wildly exaggerated). For a few days it felt a little like those movies where people are in some wilderness or on an island while the rest of the world is obliterated in some nuclear disaster. It's certainly different when you have to get some information out of a French newspaper on Sep 14th or so than watching those planes hitting all day on TV. I actually only saw those planes hitting much later, probably late in 2001.

My younger sister was on a school trip in Berlin, they were scheduled to visit the Bundestag, but this was immediately canceled for safety measures.

[Seli]

When I first heard about it on the radio I assumed it was simply a small plane that had hit one of the twin towers. It took a while to realize what was actually happening.

[baxus]

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I came home from school, grabbed a bite to eat and sat down to play some computer games.

Soon, a friend who lived across the hall came over, looked at me and said:"You're not watching tv?"

"No, should i?"

"Yes."

We went over to the TV, I picked up the remote and asked him: "Which channel?"

He responded: "Any."

 

The idea of people taking planes and smashing them into buildings was so shocking to me, I didn't know what to say.

 

As for marking it in any way, I must say I don't do that.

[Ordos]

I was not personally affected by it so I have to say no in the sense that the date does not call back strong emotions. 

 

I associate 9/11 with a series of memories because I think it's the collective thinking of a group (overall society) telling me 'remember today'. 

 

The thoughts that go through my head when somebody invokes 9/11: My mother's birthday is September 10th and my parents got married on September 12th. I was on top of the World Trade Center in the summer of 1999. 

 

As 9/11 was happening, it was late in the evening in South East Asia so I found out the following morning when I woke up and found my parents watching CNN. As the planes hit the buildings, it was late in the evening in Jakarta (I lived in the capital back then) and I was watching a movie called 'Kippendorf's Tribe' on my home computer. The movie was mediocre but thanks to 9/11 I'll never forget that movie.

[drawkcabi]

I remember I was half awake around 9am the morning of 9/11. I usually slept with TV on but muted back then, but I had left the TV on HBO. My brother called about 9:15 and said "Are you watching TV?"

 

I said "No, wait a minute" and I turned on NBC and saw the towers in flames.

 

My first thought was a major earthquake hit NYC and caused this. I had only a couple months earlier watched a documentary about how New York could have a huge earthquake, that was fresher in my mind than thinking about terrorists. How it would somehow cause the damage the way it was shown on TV my half awake brain didn't think about yet.

 

Then listening to the reporting/recapping I learned what was really going on.

 

My parents still had their restaurant back then, but only my brother went in that day. My dad had just had hip replacement surgery a month earlier and was at home recovering.

 

We had no business at the restaurant that day. That night my dad wanted pizza so we called Pizza Hut to deliver and they said it would be about a 2 hour wait.

 

ETA:

Who was on the EZ board back then? I was still a year and a half from joining. Anyone remember what the board was like? I imagine a thread about what was going on would be going crazy.

[Larry of the Lawn]

I was a freshman in college in Washington DC. You could see the Pentagon across the River from half the southfacing rooms on my floor. My room number was 911. When the first plane hit my roommate, who was.from Manhattan, got on the phone with his father, who could see the towers from the roof of his building. I was in the shower when the second plane hit.

I went to my 930 class, which was dismissed. By the time I got back to my room the Pentagon had been hit. They asked the students not to leave the dorm, but after that I packed a bag with water and food and started walking out of the city with a friend. There were still a bunch of planes in the air and being 5 blocks from the Whitehouse and three from the State Department seemed like a bad idea. I remember sending my grandma an IM on AOL to let he know I was okay. By 10 AM all the phones were pretty much jammed with traffic. I was able to get through to my parents later that afternoon from a payphone out near Shady Grove.

It was a pretty freaky day in retrospect but it just seemed surreal at the time. There was an empty building on Washington Circle that was suddenly surrounded.by Hummers and guys with assault rifles, you could see rocket launchers on the roof.

Many people on my floor had family who worked in the Towers, and several lost someone that day. I remember the next few weeks were pretty somber. I remember being kind of disgusted by the over the top nationalism and Islamophobia that sprung up right after, although I could kind of understand it too. There were a lot of late night conversations about what would be different if Gore was president.

[Werthead]

It was my day off. I was at a friend's house talking (oddly, about ASoS which I'd just made my friend read) and someone else rang up and told us to put the news on, just in time to see a replay of the second plane. Then we saw the Pentagon in flames and then we were going what the hell. Then we had the chaotic reports all afternoon of other hijackings, European cities thinking they were in danger. It was pretty nerve-wracking.

 

I was working two jobs at the time and one of them was for an insurance brokers whose main office and data server was in the World Trade Centre. They actually saw all their computer links go dead when the plane hit. We spent weeks trying to sort out people's claims because their records had just gone up in smoke. Most people were reasonable but those who weren't were insanely callous about the situation. One of the first time I realised when ignorant fucktards people could be. No, your records don't exist any more because they were just buried under tons of rubble along with, y'know, 2700 other people (350 of them from the company I was working for).

 

One thing I do remember was surprise that Bush actually acted with considerable restraint and relative intelligence afterwards. I was expecting him to start carpet-bombing Afghanistan within days (and the news was pretty damn fast in pinpointing Al-Qaeda as being responsible, I remember hurried bios of Bin Laden being run before the end of the day itself) but he held off, built up an international consensus, got the Russians on board and even let the Brits bring the Iranians in from the cold. Of course he fucked it all up a few months later, but in those days and weeks after 9/11 I had quite high hopes he'd end up being a much better president than had been expected. Not so much.

 

Who was on the EZ board back then? I was still a year and a half from joining. Anyone remember what the board was like? I imagine a thread about what was going on would be going crazy.

 

I occasionally read the board but didn't join until 4 years later. I don't think I looked, to be honest. I know the board went through a controversial time in the build-up to the Iraq War, with a huge argument between French and anti-war members against those who were more for it that led to a lot of people leaving, but 9/11 itself I imagine had more of a horrified reaction.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Here it took place in the early hours of September 12th.

 

I remember the early morning radio switching on, and talking about attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. At first I was much more worried about the Pentagon, figuring they might have triggered nuclear retaliation or something, and lay there for a few minutes thinking "yes, yes, there's the WTC, what about the Pentagon?" Curiously, it took me about half an hour before I realised that there might be coverage on TV.

[sologdin]

as it happened was teaching benjamin's 'theses on the philosophy of history' to my freshmen that morning. turned the incident immediately into an example of thesis VI--

The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

and VII--

The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

[The Marquis de Leech]

(and the news was pretty damn fast in pinpointing Al-Qaeda as being responsible, I remember hurried bios of Bin Laden being run before the end of the day itself) 

 

Well, there was at least a few hours of wondering who the hell was responsible, and people were coming up with ideas ranging from a Timothy McVeigh domestic nutjob to the outer fringes of the anti-globalisation movement. IIRC it took about a day before it became all about Bin Laden.

[Altherion]

Yes, I remember it. My high school was around 5 blocks from the WTC and we had gone up to the top to show the city to an out-of-town relative near the end of August, just before I left for college. I was sitting at my laptop doing something when my roommate came in and told me that a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. We found a TV and watched the rest. Later, I found out that my the nephew of my next door neighbor died there. My uncle worked in one of the towers, but he escaped.

[drawkcabi]

Listening to the Howard Stern broadcast from 9/11/2001

 

Very unsettling yet at the same time compelling to hear it. It puts me right back in that day, yet I can't help delving into it. In a matter of 15 minutes I can hear the world change from pre-9/11 to post 9/11.