Can't Believe 9/11 Was 15 yrs Ago

[mkdude_08]

I remember seeing Ground Zero the following January and the only thing I recall seeing that was remotely similar was the Grand Canyon. Very eerie feeling "waiting in line" with a ticket and standing next to so many articles of loved ones who died with an Indian Shaman (sp?) performing some sort of ritual.

[BigDGeek]

I was living in Europe and watched the events unfold alone.

It's odd but I don't share the same cultural touchpoints about 9/11 as most people do. For me, it happened in the afternoon. I didn't watch US television coverage of it; my coverage was in another language, narrated by people who knew next to nothing about the city, the buildings, or the actors involved.

I had to turn to English-language media to get anything approaching accurate information.

[Wittgenstein's Ghost]

Originally Posted by TeamLynn

For me it hasn't stopped.... I think about where I go and if I want to be there. I pay more attention to the people around me, the security, security features, police, people who might want to do me harm. I'm not crazy about it, just pay more attention than I did before. I've never been to NYE in Times Square, but something that crossed my mind that I might want to do once, now absolutely something I don't want to do. You can't put enough safety guidelines in place to make it reasonably safe.

I'm not trying to be impolite, but I think your fears are irrational. Terror attacks are rare events, and your odds of being involved in one -- even in a place like NYC on NYE -- are functionally zero. I don't think you're alone in having these fears, but if you were to be consistent in your risk assessment, you'd be far more likely to refrain from getting in your own bathtub out of fear of a fall than to refrain from large gatherings.


Side note unrelated to the quoted post: I believe the irrational response our country had to 9/11 was unquestionably worse than the attack itself. Far more innocent people died because we wanted to "stick a boot up your ass, it's the American way." I honestly don't view 9/11 as a galvanizing moment for the US. I view it as an unfortunate turning point, a catslyst for a variety of evil things, a bedrock for blind nationalism masquerading as patriotism and jet fuel for hysteria. I can't honestly say I am personally sad about it any more than I am sad about the thousands of people who die in car crashes or the many more thousands of people who die from Malaria every year. I recognize that those things are sad things, but in the information-soaked world we live in, I am simply aware of too many sad events to actually feel anything about any of them. For most people, 9/11 has always been an exception to such "saturation apathy," but it never has been for me. I don't feel any more affiliation to people in NYC or people in Houston than I do to people in India, and events such as the tsunami of 2006 dwarf 9/11 in terms of tragedy.

To answer the OP's question: I was a high school junior sitting in history class. Another teacher came in the room and told us to turn on the tv. A few seconds after we did, the second plane hit.

[Gilah G.]

I feel the more time passes the more some people feel null and void about this society changing event.

[MissLizzie85]

I grew up 10 miles from Manhattan and was a junior in high school. I was sitting in choir class when one of the secretaries came in over the PA and started asking for kids by name, one by one, to leave the class and come to the main office. These were kids whose parents worked in the WTC area. At the end of the period, I walked by the library and saw the TVs tuned to video of a plane hitting the first tower. When the second tower was hit, the school went into lockdown. My mom was working in the main office at the time, and the school had to individually call parents and guardians of every kid to ask them to pick their children up. If the school couldn't reach the parents, the kid stayed in the auditorium with the teachers. My mom told me and my brother to go home with a friend of mine, and we walked up to a ridge in town, along with hundreds of other people, to look at the skyline. While we were up there, we saw Building 3 fall. 12 people were killed from my town, and many of my neighbors barely escaped. Several of my brother's friends lost their parents. I'll never forget the absolute silence of that crowd, watching the smoke rise over the skyline.