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Where were you on 911?

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Jitter:
Is twenty years long enough to be history? Do you remember 911? Where we you? Were you scared?

I was in Finland so it was afternoon, about 4 pm when the first plane hit. I was hanging on IRC a the time so got news quicker than most in Finland. In 2001, websites were not as important news outlets, and the quickest coverage would have been on TV, but we were at work and didn’t have a TV. An old colleague just called yesterday (because today is Saturday) and reminisced how he heard from me what was unfolding. I also remember several other colleagues talking in the hallway, joking and laughing and I was mad at them. In retrospect I understand that some people react to a scary situation like that, but I remember telling them off: everything is going to hell and you are just laughing about it.

The first plane was a shock but of course thought to be a terrible accident. The second plane revealed that Things Are Very Bad. The scariest for me was the hit on the Pentagon. Information was of course unclear, and at some point the word via IRC was that the entire Pentagon is destroyed or on the way of becoming so. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking about the repercussions. The worst rumor was that US bombers are in the air, headed for Pakistan (I don’t know why it was supposed to be Pakistan) and that they may be carrying nuclear warheads. For a while I thought this is it, we are all going to die now.

The death toll was and continues to be staggering, and my heart weeps thinking about it still. And I’m not even an American. It didn’t touch me personally, and yet it remains one of the absolute worst days in my life. It wasn’t literally the end of the world, but for a moment it surely seemed like it might be.

Jitter:
Two further points. Firstly I know many of you weren’t even born at the time :) I would actually be especially interested in hearing how those of you, who were children, felt about it and what you understood.

Secondly I intended this thread for remembering the one historical event. If we wish to discuss the longer term consequences it will probably be better suited for the Politics thread.

tehta:
I was in the US, studying at Berkeley. (I am semi-old.) I was asleep during the first Towers impact, and found out because my parents called me from Poland to tell me they had heard more planes were hijacked and hitting all over the US. I do not remember worrying about my own safety (why would anyone hit an off-campus apartment?) but there was a sense that things would never be the same.
I ended up watching the news all day with classmates, including the hearbreaking footage of people jumping. I remember that we were very hopeful that some of the firefighters who went in would come back out...

Opaque:
I think I was in history class when I first heard of the attack. It was maybe an hour or two after everything went down. It was... hard to describe.  Fear may not be the right word. Tense maybe? I could feel the seriousness of the situation through my whole body. The history teacher tried his best to keep an even tone in his voice while he told the class what happened and what might happen later but he was obviously barely holding it together. The whole school was very quiet the rest of the day.
I felt sick for weeks after hearing about the first responders dying while trying to rescue people from the rubble. They pulled out so many bodies from all around the areas. Never seen so much devastation. Everything just became terrible so quickly.
It's kind of silly but South Park aired an episode soon after. It was dumb and nonsensical but it made people laugh which helped some people cope with the tragedy. I know it made my brother and I feel better about it. I can see why laughing can be seen as disrespectful but like you said some people use laughter as a coping mechanism.

Jitter:
Opaque how old were you at the time? If you don’t want to say, that’s obviously fully ok!

We had just bought our first own apartment and were about to renovate the kitchen. We had to go there and do the demo on the old kitchen and I remember thinking at that point (when the first fear of all out nuclear war was past) that we are screwed, there will be global recession and the apartment we just bought expensive would have an immediate price crash. But that didn’t happen either. So many things changed so much, while some things I thought would have changed a lot, didn’t.

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