So the Saudis were responsible for the attacks on the towers, obviously we needed to go after Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and failing at that task we then made up some faulty reasons to attack Iraq. And we killed 100,000 Iraqis or more, turned Afghanistan into a bigger wasteland than it already was, and set 3 Trillion dollars on fire. Not to mention the American service members who were killed and maimed and upended their families forever.
It's hard not to look on this whole debacle as anything other than a huge waste of lives and resources. We solved nothing, we gained nothing, and we learned nothing!
My son and I were getting ready to leave the house at the start of our workday. We were in Albuquerque. He would go with me to the law office where I worked, then when it was time for him to go to school, he would walk the few blocks from my office to his school.
I was gathering up my stuff and called out, "Okay, time to go." He came out of his bedroom, slinging his backpack over one shoulder, and said, "Dad, the guy on the radio said a couple planes have crashed into the World Trade Center." Imagining some small plane mishap, I said, "That's interesting. When we get to the office I'll hop on the Internet and see what I can find out."
When we got to the office, as we entered we saw the office TV had been wheeled out of the conference room and was in the middle of the main room. This was highly unusual. I said, "What's going on?" One of my co-workers said, "The South Tower just collapsed."
My son and I stood there, transfixed, watching the TV. I knew the South Tower. I had lived and worked in New York and my job had sometimes taken me to that tower every day. I said, "There would have been 20,000 people in that building."
So began that day, as the world as we had known it came to its end.
25 years later, I wonder how different things would have been if we had allowed ourselves to grieve. If the president had come on and spoken to us and comforted us and told us that every available resource would be spent finding the people who planned it, financed it, and helped enact it and we would bring every one of them to justice.
If we had ignored the impulse to lash out and treated 9/11 not as an act of war, but as a horrific crime.
What would America be like today if we had not let our grief turn to hatred and let hatred surface and turn to violence wrapped in a cloak of patriotism and vengeance?
I had just sent my three kids off to school and was watching the Today show when they cut away to live coverage of a fire at one of the World Trade Center buildings. I took a break from breakfast clean-up to watch and, as we all know, it wasn't long before that second plane hit and the realization of what was happening hit everyone in the country—the world—like a punch to the stomach. Then the Pentagon. Then the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I had recently left my job as the local newspaper editor and was on the phone to my friend who had taken my place; she was frantic for any news, because her oldest son (19) was supposed to be at Newark Airport at that time for a flight to Ireland. Of course, not everyone had cell phones at the time and she couldn't reach him. I took thorough notes, listing the time of every bit of news that was being found out in real time because, well, once a reporter, always a reporter. (After all these years, I still have those three pages of notes tucked away in a cabinet—they moved with me from Minnesota to England and I will NEVER get rid of them.)
All day today, I've been looking at photes, watching videos, and reading first-hand accounts of that day. Lots of tears have been shed and I'm sure a lot more will be shed before I go to bed tonight. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to actually BE in New York at the time because it was terrifying enough where I was, 1,500 miles away. I still remember the chaos (people in our small town lining up to gas up their cars and the three stations in town running ou, resulting in fistfights in the line in front of my house when someone tried to cut in), the uncertainty, the feeling that the country and the world were now different from what they had been the day before.
As everyone who was alive that day, I will remember all of it until the day I die.
I had lived in New York for many years and had many friends living and working there, but on 9/11 I was in Dublin Ireland trying to finish a draft of a master's thesis on pre-Famine women playwrights in the Trinity College Library.
I took a break for lunch at a nearby restaurant and encountered the entire waitstaff leaning against the wall, glued to their cellphones. After trying to determine if I had accidentally entered the restaurant before opening, I asked one of them what was going on and if I could order. "Oh," the young Irish woman said, "It's just everyone following the troubles in New York." I ordered spaghetti carbonara.
I realize now that when Irish people say the word "troubles" things are very, very, very bad. The years' long murderous violence in the North was called "The Troubles". When someone DIES, the Irish say "Sorry for your troubles."
But "troubles" doesn't hit the American ear the same way. I assumed there had been some sort of awful shooting, ate my spaghetti and caught the bus way back to my apartment to continue working.
When I got there, I turned on the television "for background noise", and completely unprepared for what was coming, watched the World Trade Center buildings' collapse, including footage of bodies falling or jumping from immense heights.
It was early in the news cycle in the US when no one knew what was happening, and in Europe, they were airing US news "reports" that the military was shooting passenger planes out of the sky to prevent further attacks.
When I finished screaming, I staggered to the local SPAR and bought every phone card I could and started dialing my friends in New York and family in the States.
No one I knew was killed in the attacks. Eventually, I learned everyone I knew in New York was safe and alive, but with some people this took an unnervingly long time - several weeks,in a couple of cases - to ascertain.
The Tuesday after 9/11, the first day international flights were cleared to land in the US, I flew home from Ireland, I flew home to Portland, OR via Newark. On approach, we could see the smoke rising from the ruin out of the airplane windows. I was still working my way down my "check to see if they are alive" list during my layover in Newark.
My terror and trauma that day, and during the days and weeks that followed, were nothing like that experienced by those in Boston, where two of the four flights originated, and Shanksville PA, Washington DC and New York where they ended, on that awful day.
To all those who lost a friend, a colleague, a co-worker, a family member on 9/11, "so very sorry for your troubles."
I had just started grad school days before the attacks that changed everything. I remember that a new colleague had invited us to a party the previous night and there was a Monday Night Football game on at that. All seemed well with the world.
The next morning in class the professor was talking about mistakes and said that a pilot made a very big mistake and crashed into the World Trade Center this morning. I said, "Wait, what?"
Later on after class news of the second tower being struck reached us upstate and I responded, "This is definitely on purpose. What is even happening?" Upon learning that both towers were burning, and learning that the attacks were high up, I figured anyone trapped in the towers was not going to survive. Everyone was shocked and an air of almost silent stillness fell through the university. Subsequently to the news of both of the towers being struck as well as the Pentagon, the tallest buildings in the city were evacuated and the university was closed. I didn't go home though.
I stayed in the computer lab all night refreshing the news, utterly fascinated and shocked that such an unthinkable (turns out it really *wasn't* unthinkable by those in power) tragedy had happened. I learned of the fates of all four of the planes and the innocent people aboard.
Ultimately, 9/11 was a huge test that we ended up failing, almost as spectacularly as we failed the test of COVID. Can the USA get away from bigotry and jingoism in the face of national tragedy, and pull together to do the right thing?
It turned out that sadopopulism was too seductive for many. It turned out that leveraging hate to weaken the USA was the way to go. And life would never be the same.
I heard about the plane while listening to my morning jazz. I grabbed my then boyfriend (now husband) and told him to come to the living room to watch CNN. First thing I thought was terrorist attack. As we watched live the 2nd plane hit the bldg my first words was, “they’re going to fall”. Sure enough they did. All I could think was I wonder if anyone I knew was a victim especially since it was UAL planes I had worked there as a flight attendant an only 3 years before.
Walking into the corporate travel company where then worked, it was a somber day. Customers families were calling to see if any of their loved ones were on those planes. We actually had a good customer who was in one the hotels near ground zero. He wrote an incredible essay about seeing people having to jump from the building to get away from the destruction. It was awful, horrific, graphic.
It’s true that NY’ers are great people. You can meet someone and connect and they’d invite you, a complete stranger to their house for dinner. I’ve seen people fall in the street and people rush to help them.
Aside from going to my dear uncle’s funeral I have not been back to NYC. I’m sure I wouldn’t recognize it anymore.
NYC is amazing. It is far less gritty than it was in the 80s and 90s.
I will say, going to Ground Zero several times, the transformation was so dramatic. I actually went there to see the site when the demolition had finished with a friend in the early oughts and there was a sort of...stillness. You could feel the enormity of what had happened. Indeed I had actually been to the observatory on the 110th floor less than a year prior to 9/11 and turns out still have pictures from it. To see that such a huge structure no longer exists is humbling.
The memorials in the footprints of the towers are awe-inspiring too. And the reverence with which people treat the memorial is particularly poignant. You can tell that the people who are actually there, actually care. All despite the reputation given to them by people who delight in hurting the residents of NYC because they give a home to minorities that the unreconstructed hate.
The new tower is pretty nice if not a bit...sterile...and of course it has the TSA-style security. I have gone exactly once, don't think I'll do it again if I'm honest.
The balance of the World Trade Center campus is worth a visit, if at least to go to the Oculus transit center/mall. It is such a gorgeous building and I've been there several times (and there's actually good shops and food there—it is what superseded the original World Trade Center mall).
The new 1 World Trade Center is actually conventionally constructed unlike the original Twin Towers (which used a tube and steel core/lightweight frame kind of deal), so would be resistant to pretty much any calamity and there'd always be a way down. I suppose the security theater helps with safety but I know a thing or two about a thing or two with the building's construction and that helped me.
I was at work, and I remember hearing a plane had hit the WTC. My first thought was, gee that place has had a lot of problems the last few years (it hadn't been that long since the 1993 bombing), and my second thought was that it must be a Cessna or other small plane that accidentally crashed. The rest of the day was spent in slack jawed horror, watching first the 2nd plane hit and then the towers collapse, hearing about the Pentagon attack (where the son of a friend of my father's was killed) and finally Flight 93. I went home and sobbed. I'm sorry we are much worse off now than we were-even terrified and disoriented-that day, no lessons learned. If that happened today in NY, probably half the country would celebrate it.
I was at work, here in Spartanburg, when the attack happened. The first that I knew of something going on, was noticing a group of people down the hall, at the doorway of the conference room. They weren't going in or out, they were standing there. I don't remember what it was that I was in the middle of for work, but it was something that I needed to get done right then. Afterwards, I could find out what was going on. When I got the chance, I started down the hall, and a co-worker said something about the Pentagon being on fire. Yes, that was a big deal, and my reasoning was that those people in the conference room were watching the news on the TV there. I was right, but learned, when I finally made it to the conference room, that both Twin Towers had been attacked as well as the Pentagon, and both had fallen. And all of the attacks were by plane! A fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, taken over by the passengers, so as to spare the fourth target - the Capitol in DC. No more work was done that day, and some co-workers with friends and family in NYC, were frantic to find out if they were OK. They all were OK, at least physically.
For all of us, it was a day that left a deep scar on our psyche; one that never seems to heal.
I've been on a news blackout for a few days, can only take so much grief porn.
Operation Enduring Freedom was the revised name. They originally called it Operation Iraqi Liberation. O.I.L. A bit too on the nose.
So the Saudis were responsible for the attacks on the towers, obviously we needed to go after Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and failing at that task we then made up some faulty reasons to attack Iraq. And we killed 100,000 Iraqis or more, turned Afghanistan into a bigger wasteland than it already was, and set 3 Trillion dollars on fire. Not to mention the American service members who were killed and maimed and upended their families forever.
It's hard not to look on this whole debacle as anything other than a huge waste of lives and resources. We solved nothing, we gained nothing, and we learned nothing!
My son and I were getting ready to leave the house at the start of our workday. We were in Albuquerque. He would go with me to the law office where I worked, then when it was time for him to go to school, he would walk the few blocks from my office to his school.
I was gathering up my stuff and called out, "Okay, time to go." He came out of his bedroom, slinging his backpack over one shoulder, and said, "Dad, the guy on the radio said a couple planes have crashed into the World Trade Center." Imagining some small plane mishap, I said, "That's interesting. When we get to the office I'll hop on the Internet and see what I can find out."
When we got to the office, as we entered we saw the office TV had been wheeled out of the conference room and was in the middle of the main room. This was highly unusual. I said, "What's going on?" One of my co-workers said, "The South Tower just collapsed."
My son and I stood there, transfixed, watching the TV. I knew the South Tower. I had lived and worked in New York and my job had sometimes taken me to that tower every day. I said, "There would have been 20,000 people in that building."
So began that day, as the world as we had known it came to its end.
25 years later, I wonder how different things would have been if we had allowed ourselves to grieve. If the president had come on and spoken to us and comforted us and told us that every available resource would be spent finding the people who planned it, financed it, and helped enact it and we would bring every one of them to justice.
If we had ignored the impulse to lash out and treated 9/11 not as an act of war, but as a horrific crime.
What would America be like today if we had not let our grief turn to hatred and let hatred surface and turn to violence wrapped in a cloak of patriotism and vengeance?
I think it would be a much nicer place.
I had just sent my three kids off to school and was watching the Today show when they cut away to live coverage of a fire at one of the World Trade Center buildings. I took a break from breakfast clean-up to watch and, as we all know, it wasn't long before that second plane hit and the realization of what was happening hit everyone in the country—the world—like a punch to the stomach. Then the Pentagon. Then the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I had recently left my job as the local newspaper editor and was on the phone to my friend who had taken my place; she was frantic for any news, because her oldest son (19) was supposed to be at Newark Airport at that time for a flight to Ireland. Of course, not everyone had cell phones at the time and she couldn't reach him. I took thorough notes, listing the time of every bit of news that was being found out in real time because, well, once a reporter, always a reporter. (After all these years, I still have those three pages of notes tucked away in a cabinet—they moved with me from Minnesota to England and I will NEVER get rid of them.)
All day today, I've been looking at photes, watching videos, and reading first-hand accounts of that day. Lots of tears have been shed and I'm sure a lot more will be shed before I go to bed tonight. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to actually BE in New York at the time because it was terrifying enough where I was, 1,500 miles away. I still remember the chaos (people in our small town lining up to gas up their cars and the three stations in town running ou, resulting in fistfights in the line in front of my house when someone tried to cut in), the uncertainty, the feeling that the country and the world were now different from what they had been the day before.
As everyone who was alive that day, I will remember all of it until the day I die.
I had lived in New York for many years and had many friends living and working there, but on 9/11 I was in Dublin Ireland trying to finish a draft of a master's thesis on pre-Famine women playwrights in the Trinity College Library.
I took a break for lunch at a nearby restaurant and encountered the entire waitstaff leaning against the wall, glued to their cellphones. After trying to determine if I had accidentally entered the restaurant before opening, I asked one of them what was going on and if I could order. "Oh," the young Irish woman said, "It's just everyone following the troubles in New York." I ordered spaghetti carbonara.
I realize now that when Irish people say the word "troubles" things are very, very, very bad. The years' long murderous violence in the North was called "The Troubles". When someone DIES, the Irish say "Sorry for your troubles."
But "troubles" doesn't hit the American ear the same way. I assumed there had been some sort of awful shooting, ate my spaghetti and caught the bus way back to my apartment to continue working.
When I got there, I turned on the television "for background noise", and completely unprepared for what was coming, watched the World Trade Center buildings' collapse, including footage of bodies falling or jumping from immense heights.
It was early in the news cycle in the US when no one knew what was happening, and in Europe, they were airing US news "reports" that the military was shooting passenger planes out of the sky to prevent further attacks.
When I finished screaming, I staggered to the local SPAR and bought every phone card I could and started dialing my friends in New York and family in the States.
No one I knew was killed in the attacks. Eventually, I learned everyone I knew in New York was safe and alive, but with some people this took an unnervingly long time - several weeks,in a couple of cases - to ascertain.
The Tuesday after 9/11, the first day international flights were cleared to land in the US, I flew home from Ireland, I flew home to Portland, OR via Newark. On approach, we could see the smoke rising from the ruin out of the airplane windows. I was still working my way down my "check to see if they are alive" list during my layover in Newark.
My terror and trauma that day, and during the days and weeks that followed, were nothing like that experienced by those in Boston, where two of the four flights originated, and Shanksville PA, Washington DC and New York where they ended, on that awful day.
To all those who lost a friend, a colleague, a co-worker, a family member on 9/11, "so very sorry for your troubles."
I had just started grad school days before the attacks that changed everything. I remember that a new colleague had invited us to a party the previous night and there was a Monday Night Football game on at that. All seemed well with the world.
The next morning in class the professor was talking about mistakes and said that a pilot made a very big mistake and crashed into the World Trade Center this morning. I said, "Wait, what?"
Later on after class news of the second tower being struck reached us upstate and I responded, "This is definitely on purpose. What is even happening?" Upon learning that both towers were burning, and learning that the attacks were high up, I figured anyone trapped in the towers was not going to survive. Everyone was shocked and an air of almost silent stillness fell through the university. Subsequently to the news of both of the towers being struck as well as the Pentagon, the tallest buildings in the city were evacuated and the university was closed. I didn't go home though.
I stayed in the computer lab all night refreshing the news, utterly fascinated and shocked that such an unthinkable (turns out it really *wasn't* unthinkable by those in power) tragedy had happened. I learned of the fates of all four of the planes and the innocent people aboard.
Ultimately, 9/11 was a huge test that we ended up failing, almost as spectacularly as we failed the test of COVID. Can the USA get away from bigotry and jingoism in the face of national tragedy, and pull together to do the right thing?
It turned out that sadopopulism was too seductive for many. It turned out that leveraging hate to weaken the USA was the way to go. And life would never be the same.
I heard about the plane while listening to my morning jazz. I grabbed my then boyfriend (now husband) and told him to come to the living room to watch CNN. First thing I thought was terrorist attack. As we watched live the 2nd plane hit the bldg my first words was, “they’re going to fall”. Sure enough they did. All I could think was I wonder if anyone I knew was a victim especially since it was UAL planes I had worked there as a flight attendant an only 3 years before.
Walking into the corporate travel company where then worked, it was a somber day. Customers families were calling to see if any of their loved ones were on those planes. We actually had a good customer who was in one the hotels near ground zero. He wrote an incredible essay about seeing people having to jump from the building to get away from the destruction. It was awful, horrific, graphic.
It’s true that NY’ers are great people. You can meet someone and connect and they’d invite you, a complete stranger to their house for dinner. I’ve seen people fall in the street and people rush to help them.
Aside from going to my dear uncle’s funeral I have not been back to NYC. I’m sure I wouldn’t recognize it anymore.
NYC is amazing. It is far less gritty than it was in the 80s and 90s.
I will say, going to Ground Zero several times, the transformation was so dramatic. I actually went there to see the site when the demolition had finished with a friend in the early oughts and there was a sort of...stillness. You could feel the enormity of what had happened. Indeed I had actually been to the observatory on the 110th floor less than a year prior to 9/11 and turns out still have pictures from it. To see that such a huge structure no longer exists is humbling.
The memorials in the footprints of the towers are awe-inspiring too. And the reverence with which people treat the memorial is particularly poignant. You can tell that the people who are actually there, actually care. All despite the reputation given to them by people who delight in hurting the residents of NYC because they give a home to minorities that the unreconstructed hate.
I was too afraid to ever go in the tower, Seth.
The new tower is pretty nice if not a bit...sterile...and of course it has the TSA-style security. I have gone exactly once, don't think I'll do it again if I'm honest.
The balance of the World Trade Center campus is worth a visit, if at least to go to the Oculus transit center/mall. It is such a gorgeous building and I've been there several times (and there's actually good shops and food there—it is what superseded the original World Trade Center mall).
The new 1 World Trade Center is actually conventionally constructed unlike the original Twin Towers (which used a tube and steel core/lightweight frame kind of deal), so would be resistant to pretty much any calamity and there'd always be a way down. I suppose the security theater helps with safety but I know a thing or two about a thing or two with the building's construction and that helped me.
I was at work, and I remember hearing a plane had hit the WTC. My first thought was, gee that place has had a lot of problems the last few years (it hadn't been that long since the 1993 bombing), and my second thought was that it must be a Cessna or other small plane that accidentally crashed. The rest of the day was spent in slack jawed horror, watching first the 2nd plane hit and then the towers collapse, hearing about the Pentagon attack (where the son of a friend of my father's was killed) and finally Flight 93. I went home and sobbed. I'm sorry we are much worse off now than we were-even terrified and disoriented-that day, no lessons learned. If that happened today in NY, probably half the country would celebrate it.
I was at work, here in Spartanburg, when the attack happened. The first that I knew of something going on, was noticing a group of people down the hall, at the doorway of the conference room. They weren't going in or out, they were standing there. I don't remember what it was that I was in the middle of for work, but it was something that I needed to get done right then. Afterwards, I could find out what was going on. When I got the chance, I started down the hall, and a co-worker said something about the Pentagon being on fire. Yes, that was a big deal, and my reasoning was that those people in the conference room were watching the news on the TV there. I was right, but learned, when I finally made it to the conference room, that both Twin Towers had been attacked as well as the Pentagon, and both had fallen. And all of the attacks were by plane! A fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, taken over by the passengers, so as to spare the fourth target - the Capitol in DC. No more work was done that day, and some co-workers with friends and family in NYC, were frantic to find out if they were OK. They all were OK, at least physically.
For all of us, it was a day that left a deep scar on our psyche; one that never seems to heal.
Watching those towers collapse on live TV was one of the most awful, traumatic things I've ever seen.