Where were you on 911?

[thorny]

I was doing a market harvest, along with a couple of farm interns who were here that year. Somebody was in the house when the phone rang; it was a neighbor who always has her TV on, calling to tell us about it. At the point when we turned on the radio, both planes had hit the Towers and a third plane was known to be off course and presumed to be intending to hit someplace. My immediate thought was "We're at war -- I wonder who with?" followed immediately by the second thought that it was terrible we were in such a state that I could think of multiple candidates.

At market the next day, somebody (I think the local fire department, might not be remembering right) was collecting for the NYCity firefighters, and we took a fast impromptu unanimous vote and did a group contribution from the market as a whole.

But I never thought "this changes everything". I still don't. Obviously it did for the people who died in the attack (and eventually in the ensuing war), and for their immediate family etc.; but for quite a lot of people in the USA, the only thing that actually changed in their lives, besides rhetoric, was that if you needed to fly anywhere it got a whole lot more complicated and annoying. But the USA has been in wars on and off throughout its existence; had had attacks on US soil before; had had terrorists blow things up before -- I was astonished that so many people seemed to be going around saying 'but how could this happen to us?!' It seemed to me utterly obvious that of course it could happen to us.

[Grade E cat]

Just noticed that topic was here, so I wanted to share my own memory, if a little late.

I was twelve years old at the time. I know my father had moved to his own place at that point, because I was having my week with him when my mother called his landline to tell me about the planes hitting the towers. From hearing her reminisce about it in more recent years, I know that thanks to her workplace's ties to the US, she and colleagues watched at least one of the crashes going on live. Between my young age and my autistic spectrum induced social obliviousness, I didn't understand it wasn't some sort of accident at the time of the phone call and may have needed to watch the news footage or something for it to really kick in. I had gotten a quite large drool-proof stuffed Hello Kitty at some "sell your old stuff" event not that long before that and I remember hugging it a lot while watching news footage. I remember a scare around one of my mother's colleagues getting an Amazon package delivered at their workplace not long after the attacks, when people were still legitimately worried that foreign offices of US companies might get targeted by terrorist acts. My junior high school had a music class in which we had been learning the French version of "The Ballad of Jesse James", and I came up with a parody involving Osama Bin Laden. I also remember someone telling me a joke about George Bush always losing at chess (rooks are called "towers" in French, it's all you need to know). A few years later, I was beginning one of my high school years and we were all getting our text books. The one for history had two photos on it, one was of the twin towers sometime between the first hit and their collapse.

When I was a kid, my mother managed to bring me with her to the US about once every couple of years. The last time we were there before 9/11, we happened to be in New York. At some point, we were on a boat that was in a place that had a good view of part of the skyline, including the twin towers. One of my mother's memories from that day is acting on an impulse to point the twin towers out to me that seemingly came out of nowhere.

[Sc0ut]

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.

My experience was somewhat similar to yours. I was in my early teens, and my family had an unusually good year so we were installing a water heater in our apartment that day and doing other minor renovations. I was at home because it was still the summer holidays in my Eastern European country. The tv was on while everyone was busy around the house. After the first plane hit, we all gathered around to watch. I remember sitting on the rolled up carpet in the middle of our living room, watching the second plane hit and thinking in a sort of dissociated calm "guess there's no point in renovating anymore, there's probably gonna be a world war again". This is probably funny to those of you who were older when this happened, but to me back then, it seemed surreal that something so terrible could happen, and the fact that I saw it live on TV was a bit more than I could handle then. I was old enough to realise the tragedy at that point (and empathetic to an extreme), but nobody around me could have offered any reassurance, even if I felt like I could talk to them about what I was feeling. That was when I lost any remaining hope that the adults in charge have it under control, and that the world is a safe place in general.

[Jitter]

Thank you Cat and Sc0ut for adding to the discussion. “That’s when I learned the world is not a safe place” is momentous.

It was a powerful event and I believe a contributing factor in many things still that persist today, not the least of which is the continuing or in fact currently growing influence of various conspiracy theories on mainstream politics and on people who upon first inspection seem to appear fairly rational. I mean could Trump have been elected in a world with no 911? I don’t think so, how about you Americans?

[Opaque]

Ah, that's a good question. There are a lot of people who like Trump because he has the life many people wish they had. Money, inheritance, power. And he tends to speak his mind with no filter and dosen't care what the consequences are. I'm sure that is part of why he's popular too.

But that alone is probably not enough to win any elections. A mix of terrorists attacks and the considerable amount of time we've spent in the middle east might have worn folks down.

I'll admit that I didn't give Trump a fair chance when he first started campaigning for presidency. The few times I saw him on TV he reminded me of a cartoon villain. Guess I wasn't far off though. Call me crazy but I prefer my presents to act more professional.

[translunaryAnimus (TA)]

I was not born yet (would be a few short years after though) so growing up my only exposure to 9/11 were the days held in school where we'd say the pledge of allegiance (The USA Is really weird about national allegiance but now is not the time nor place to discuss that) and then have a longer than usual moment of silence afterwards. That and the horrible kids who would make plane crashing into the towers jokes constantly and get reprimanded by the teachers.

Never really understood what happened until my mom started crying one day while talking about it and showed me a picture of where the twin towers used to be. I do remember this scaring me at the time because I lived in the same state the attacks took place (I don't anymore) so in my child mind I was very worried about another attack occurring even though none had happened since.

Now that I'm nearly an adult (just gotta wait till summer comes and goes) it doesn't impact me as much, I suppose I feel disconnected from it because it seems like so long ago. But maybe that just shows how Americans have a terrible time scale because the USA really isn't the oldest country out there.

Not much of a dramatic experience or anything really, just how I as a member of one of the younger American generations views the event. I know it was a tragedy but it doesn't feel as present as it once did.

[Jitter]

Thank you MintheTea! A very interesting perspective. I started the thread asking whether 20 years counted as history, and your comment seals it that it does. It was a long ago. Not SO long for me as I remember it clearly, but long enough for people who are grown up already were not born at the time.

My oldest recently turned 18 so was a couple years late for the event just like you. I should ask him what he thinks and feels about it, I know they have studied it in world history in school and he’s quite interested in American politics (considering how he’s a European teenager).

This is exawhat I was hoping for when asking this question. It’s hard ro keep in mind others have very different perspectives, as demonstrated by my question “where were you”, implying that anyone interested in answering was around at all at the time. Thanks for reminding me that is not the case

[Róisín]

I was alive but living in Australia. A friend rang and woke me and told me to urgently turn on the television because something dreadful had happened in America. She sounded frantic, so since she was normally a very calm person I scrambled to do so. I didn’t know at the time that one of my relatives had died in the disaster. He was an engineer, and had gone into the city for a project meeting at just the wrong time.

[Kevin_Redcrow]

I was between jobs at the time, so I tended to get up later in the morning than when I am employed.

First thing I'd do was log on to the 'net. It was dial-up 56kps at the time. I always started on the MSNBC website. The headline said, "Planes Ram, Destroy Twin Towers"

I utterly did not believe it when I saw it. The reason I didn't believe it, was that MSNBC at the time, would run a movie ad making it look like a sensational news article, so I actually ignored it. I thought it was an ad for a bad science fiction film.

But as I surfed my usual sites, I kept seeing more World Trade Center attack articles. I probably went along like this for 30 minutes with "thiscan'tbehappeningthiscan'tbehappeningthiscan'tbehappeningthiscan'tbehappening" running through my head.

I finally turned on my television and watched the horror for the next 5 hours.

Since 9/11, the world just seems to have become weirder and worse. I suppose if one lives past the age of 50, this  attitude is universal.

[Róisín]

Speaking as someone past 80, ‘weirder and worse’ is about it. Though there are still good bits here and there, mostly good people.