Where were you on September 11, 2001?
I was standing in the hallway outside the band room - it was my junior year of high school and I was waiting for 1st period to begin - when my friend Jonathan came out of the AV room where he usually watched Pokemon on a local station before school started and told a group of us that a plane had hit the WTC. The way he described it made it seem like it was a small private jet or somesuch so I didn't think much of it until about 20 minutes later the vice principal made the announcement over the intercom that the second plane had hit, and that it looked like a terrorist attack. The rest of the day I remember being glued to the monitors that every teacher had on CNN or whatever, except for my trigonometry teacher who bizarrely made us plow through our scheduled lesson. I still have the page from our school-issued organizer's calendar, where I wrote about the planes hitting the twin towers and the Pentagon, as well as the later debunked rumor that a car bomb had been set off at the State Department.
This possibly isn't of interest to anyone else, but I am interested in your part of the story. Where were you? What do you remember?
This possibly isn't of interest to anyone else, but I am interested in your part of the story. Where were you? What do you remember?
Comments
I remember watching Sky News a few weeks later and they were showing videos of soldiers in gas masks and talking about chemical warfare. Bricks were shat by me. Thanks, Rupert Murdoch.
Other than the horror being broadcast it's kind of a fond memory for me cause my family almost always has the news on. A day of it where we were all actively participating, reporting to each other what news the other networks hadn't received yet, was kind of fun. >< Childish innocence I guess haha.
My parents even managed to find a tv to set up in their shop that day. I wondered if everyone just sort of sat around watching tv that day. I was thinking if it had been a natural disaster causing a comparable amount of damage and casualties it wouldn't have had quite the disruptive effect.
Went to school. Watched it in every class, until by final period we were so sick of it we just did class as normal.
I didn't see it on the news until I got home and my mom was watching it. Me and my brothers didn't take it very seriously at first, we watched for a little while and then set about our usual after school goofing around, until our mom made us stop and watch. After a little awhile it became more obvious how big a deal it was.
Looking back, I think this was an initial trigger for my not getting cable television when I moved into my own place. I'm still ashamed by how utterly absorbed I was with a five-second film reel that felt like it would go on forever. For most of September 11th, my life was being a useless lump, refusing to look away from the set, simultaneously hoping and dreading more information on what had happened and why.
Though I try to downplay things this time of year (we as a nation are doing a bit too much looking backward at this point), I do get introspective, but mostly because random minor milestones seem to coincide with this date.
Thank you. Personally, I hate the "Never forget" mantra. We're so damn afraid of getting hit again that we forget to focus on more important things. 9/11 happened, and we can't change that, and even if we keep beefing up our security, we're going to get hit again eventually. I just wish we could be a bit like England and move on.
I mean, I feel like an idiot saying it, but... I feel like I missed out on all of it. I'm still really bitter about it. I didn't quite live through it, I merely heard stories about it later. I'm just like the kids who were born after September 11th, or those who were too little to have any idea of what was going on. I think what's worse for me is that my parents raised me in a brutally honest environment- when my grandparents died when I was really little, there was no beating around the bush-- shit sucks, grandma and grandpa are dead, there's nothing you can do about it. I had the same attitude for my brother and his autism- life gives you shit, but you don't shy away from it, you just deal with it and try to make it better. For my whole school to collectively ignore a national attack that killed thousands of people to protect the feelings of the students, I was just soo put off by it.
But yeah. The clearest memory I have is standing outside of my school, telling my mom auditions had been cancelled, her reaction, and feelings of anger and shame that I had been completely ignorant for the entire day. I was glued to the television for the rest of the night.
I was out in the parking lot with the rest of the marching band running our normal morning practice routines during first block. Our band director stopped practice to inform us that one of the towers had a plane crash into it. I honestly didn't give a shit at the time.
Later on that day, during second block when I went to Japanese, the TV was on and everyone was watching coverage. It slowly dawned on me throughout the day the magnitude of what had happened. But for the most part, I wasn't phased. At that time in my life I lived in a fairly sheltered bubble. My parents never sheltered me, I think it was mostly my own doing. I was profoundly uninterested in anything that did not involve my Playstation in some way.