hi julia

Hello Julia, just fyi, MSNBC is playing that morning over again now. Now to read.

(((julia)))

Thank you Julia.

I was in the world trade center often when we lived in NY in the 90’s. Made a point to visit ground zero on my first trip back to NYC after 9/11.

I was home in Texas when my husband called to tell me that a plane had hit the WTC. I went about my errands thinking there was nothing I could do in response. I was in a store when the first building fell. Watched it all on the store’s TV. Then went home,

I was at home getting ready to go to work… never made it in to work. Ten days later I found out my young family friend was on the flight that went down in Shawshank PA! And the fact that the Republicans have used this monstrosity for Political gain goes beyond the pale! Since 9-11 the Republicans and BushCo have used this incident to terrorize the whole population of the US, instead of bring the country together they cold heartedly divided the good people of this country!!

Are the posts all coming so close together for a reason today or am I not used to being on the dayside?

Hi Julia.

I was jogging south on the East River path, about 62nd Street when the first plane hit. I saw an enormous plume of brown smoke blowing across the river farther south. Then scores of screaing sirens, all headed south. I got back to my building in a few more minutes & asked the doorman what happened. He said a plane hit the WTC. I asked: accidently or on purpose, never for a second thinking it was an accident. I went into the gym on the first floor, and was riveted to the TVs there until after both buildings collapsed. There were a couple of other people there but little was said. Finally I went up to my apt to shower, and went out for lunch. There were hundreds of people on foot walking up First Ave and across the Queensborough Bridge. Many were stopping in bars along the way.

Went down to as near as I could get to Ground Zero the next day. Watched as tow trucks and dump trucks carted debris away on the West Side Drive.

Anger. Intense anger at my government for failing to do ts primary job, protect the country.

I knew nothing about foreign affairs or politics back then, but I was recently retired, so I have spent the last 7 years in intense learning. Overintellectualizing is how I cope.

we were zig-zagging between blog branches

Hi Julia. Thoughtful post. One of my colleagues got a call from her Mom this morning as the re-broadcast was being aired. She was still a bit sleepy, and apparently thought it was happening all over again. Another friend from work attended a memorial today for his brother (as he does every 9/11), who was in the first building hit. The day’s mark on most everyone is indelible, as is the other sad fact that all good feelings, support, and intentions from the world at large were squandered by the present administration.

Hey, all.

Digg is open Pups so start Digging!

On that day, my brother-in-law and his family were supposed to come out to visit us from Rhode Island. Their flight path was the exact same as two of the flights (Boston to San Francisco). They just had a slightly later flight.

When we woke up and heard the news, my husband leapt out of bed and called his brother. They had heard the news on the radio as they were getting into the car.

My husband’s brother and family were coming out for our youngest’s baptism. The brother-in-law and wife were going to be the grandparents.

My husband’s parents were supposed to follow out the next day. Of course, that never happened.

We had been back east right before, and we all were joking around that it was only going to be two weeks before we saw each other again (I actually adore my in-laws– probably because we don’t see each other so often).

This is all well and good, but then my mother-in-law (whom I idored) decides to have a major stroke on 12/31/01. We never saw her again.

She was devastated by what happened on 9/11, and she was absolutely horrified about what the Bush Administration did after that.

We all, as a nation, had a horrible thing happen to us. But, what these people have done afterward is the most disturbint (and horrifying) thing of all.

The idea that you’re a liberal– that you’ll never forget? We’re the people that remember everything.

A lot of people have died since then, and I remember about them too.

I’m the same way, I remember the loved ones I lost before and think, at least they didn’t have to witness that terrible day. I remember the loved ones I’ve lost since then and somehow the grief seems like part of the same experience.

I was in Fargo, just getting back home from early morning errands downtown. Marley and I stood side by side in the living room watching in horror as events unfolded. I remember watching Ashleigh Banfield on MSNBC…now there was a strong woman.

I had my hand cupped over my mouth for over an hour, not believing what I was seeing, just standing shellshocked. From time to time Marley nuzzled my shin, but he never asked to be let out. I remember.

Two years later, I was in Manhattan for a writers conference and a friend and I went down to Ground Zero on Sunday morning and walked the perimeter and then thru the small church that played such a vital role as a staging area. And I remembered.

The Republicans who have used 9/11 for their political gain are immoral, unethical, and, yes, they are evil. And they know who they are.

Thank you, Julia.

Let’s not forget together, shall we?

Hi Julia….. I worked with clients from NYC since 2002…… One is one of the unions where many of the members worked day and night in the recovery ….. and they are showing the effects ….. one young man was diagnosed with testicular cancer…. lots of respiratory problems and disability……

Heard a lot of hatred against Starbucks because whether it is a urban legend or true they express stories of Starbucks charging for water for victims who need to have the ash washed off themselves…..

AND the site is a big hole….. been there as recently as June…..
On 911 I was working as a medical case manager for an insurance company that managed Federal Employees….. they ended closing our office for a couple of days…. and then we had to deal with the anthrax threat…. we managed the Mail Handlers Union members…..

Forgot to mention. My son had just entered his freshman year at college on the other coast. I tried calling him on his cell phone to let him know I was OK,* but of course his NY based cell phone was kaput because the cell towers were on top the WTC. I didn’t have his land line number (who could have thought that would be important?) so had to wait until the college offices opened at noon NYC time to get his number & call him. He was just getting up and learning what had happened, so he did not have time to worry before my call.
*There was a big meeting of economists at the hotel adjacent to the WTC that morning, but luckily I was not there. Everyone at that meeting got out safely.

Curiously, I knew no one who died that day. WTC, name not withstanding, was never a commercial success. Very few Wall St. types had offices there. The people I knew at the one client I visited there with spectacular offices on a high floor, must have been traveling that day. Otherwise they never would have gotten out. Wall St day starts well before the first plane hit (I had 2 standing meeting every week that started at 7:15.) The reason why so few people died is that state govt had taken up a lot of the office space, and those folks don’t get to work before 9.

I am in Manhattan several times a year, but have only been to the southern end of the island once since 2001. The tourist-trap spectacle that that gaping hole in the ground has become makes me ill.

I was at work in Massachusetts on the day, and spent most of it on the phone trying to find out about everyone I knew then living in NYC. The fact hit me later that we were most likely on the original flight path for all the flights out of Logan that were diverted once they wereover the Hudson. Those planes probably flew right over my little town before they turned south and became weapons. A humbling thought.

It was one manager, and he charged rescue workers for drinking water.

He was fired. Starbucks donated a _lot_ of stuff to the rescue workers after that.

I had just woken up that morning after delivering newspapers all night I flipped the TV on drove to my dad’s house and we told my sister to leave Chicago which everyone was trying to do at the same time.
Mayor Daley declared a no fly zone on his own around Chicago that guy had a real plan for a terror attack that was better than Rudy’s.
The Chicago Tribune put out a special run for everybody in the neighborhoods we delivered too, I think even noncustomers got one.
None of the drivers had got any sleep the donnut shop made money that night on coffee, and then we delivered the regular paper and the special one.
One guy on my route sat in his truck all night I passed him a few times with a full sized American Flag held up with a frame on his truck bed and spot lights shinning on the flag.
Everytime I passed him I worried he was going to reach for a gun. I’m a little brown and already people were talking about al Quieda. Coffee and Fear/Anger etc kept me from crashing that night from lack of sleep.

that’s good to hear

What scared me was how scared people in my neighborhood were. We have a lot of south asian neighbors, and they were terrified. The children were screaming when their mothers dropped them off at school when it reopened because they thought something was going to happen to them, because they were Different like the bad guys were Different.

It scared me that I wasn’t sure they were wrong. Once or twice, thankfully not near us, they weren’t wrong.

I was on the road from Brattleboro VT to Concord NH for a ministers meeting. As I was pulling into the parking lot they talked about the second plane hitting the building. I had a tiny portable radio with a little under pillow speaker—the radio was meant to be used with headphones. I brought it in and told the people on the office who actually had a tv they could turn on.

We tried to have our scheduled meeting but that didn’t work. I called my husband at work in Boston. Met him at home in the western burbs, repacked some clean clothes and went back to Brattleboro where the phone tree of the church went into gear. I hastily put together a service for the church that night. Long day, lots of miles and we didn’t really grasp what was happening yet. That wouldn’t happen for a long time to come.

When I lived in NYC in the ’70’s I had one occasion to be in Windows on the World. It was quite the sparkly space seemingly suspended in the stars. It was a lifetime ago.

bragging time.

my nephew, cassie’s older brother, is one of the good guys. he’s in the national guard, and already down on the TX coast doing hurricane preparation. News article here.

That is so glad to hear since I have two kids who worked at Starbucks which pays for parttime work, tuition assistance and benefits too….

On 911 I got ready for work as usual….. at that time I never turned on the TeeVee… I was going to college full time for my software engineering degree and working full time…… so every minute I studied or did homework….. I was on the drive to work….. listening to NPR with some very calm announcer tell me about the attacks, I thought it was a joke…… I called my boyfriend and he turned on the TeeVee….. we talked all the way into work……I sat in my truck, in the parking garage at work while I listened to the TeeVee…… sat there crying……. as soon as I got up to the 16th floor….. you know things were happening……. This was Phoenix but the members to our insurance plan are Federal Employees…… Postal workers, Judges, Forest Service, VA workers….. the civilians working in the Pentagon were our members…..

In my next job….. several of my co-workers were in NYC on 911 for the kick off of a new project…… they were trapped in the city for days…… they pooled their money, bought a used car and drove out……

Thanks Julia.
I was acquainted via internet group with a woman who worked on the 97th floor, and she was still on the bus from NJ when it happened. She IM’d someone in the group that she was fine.
I spent the day looking out the door, into the sky.
I was too shocked and numb to even cry.
My friend had moved to Alexandria, VA. Her grown children were on a plane and she was at Dulles to pick them up, when she got word that WTC and the Pentagon had been hit. Her kids landed minutes later.
A doc/officer from our town was in the Pentagon but he went to the gift shop first so he was spared. He started the triage.

Good on him. I hope he stays safe. Ike seems to be quite beast.

I was working the reference desk, here in Cleveland. Mr. CE called me and said that “the WTC buildings fell to the ground after planes hit them.” I answered “WHAT!” We all ran to Education, the only dept. that had a tv, and watched with horror. Many of us cried and screamed. We were told to evacuate the building and the city. It was chaos for hours, and we learned that the plane turned around over Cleveland and headed for the crash in PA.

The next day there was a bomb threat to the museum building. Standing in our fire evacuation spot, I became really angry about standing in a parking garage with four concrete floors above me, in a bomb threat. I don’t think I’ve ever been the same, and so Mr. CE tells me.

Thank you Julia.

we thought we had a bomb threat to the jewish community center a few days after, but turns out that it wasn’t. the campus installed caller id very shortly thereafter and improved security.

For twelve years my desk faced a window one block south of WTC. My subway stop was at 1 WTC. I did virtually all of my daily “life’s errands” on the WTC concourse.

I was working with a Muslim colleague for many years. He was from Morocco but married an American and became a citizen. After the bombing in 1993, he said “they will come back and this will be their target”. Naive that I was said “how can you say that?” He said “they have failed and must make this right.”

Consequently, cannot say I was completely surprised by the attack. However, like many NYers, eventually reality set in. I lost friends/acquaintances of various ages — a dozen people from all over the socioeconomic spectrum.

The hardest part for me was losing both my daughter’s first babysitter (an actress) and a peer of my daughter’s. Talk about full circle. Also, for those of us who were close to/involved with politics, we knew the “America’s Mayor” meme was complete crap. Most NYers were ready to ride him out on a rail on 9/10.

I had thought the election of 2000 was the nadir of hope for me. Not true. That day, and the resultant coopting of the tragedy, brought me lower than I could imagine.

Hope Cassie’s in safe harbor amid the storm worries!

Yes, 9/11 made so many bad people good for so long. Compounded the tragedy bigtime. Guiliani is laughing all the way to the bank as a security consultant.

You know, I’m so sick of 9/11, I could just PUKE.

Yes, Yes, heroic people got killed, innocents got killed. It was an attack on US soil, blah blah blah.

9/11 was an evil thing but the things done in “responding” to 9/11 are so much more evil than the acts themselves.

I sympathize with the victims and their families, but 9/11 has been used to send us down a slippery slope to being Stalinist Russia. IF you don’t think Cheney is a Stalinist, you’re just not paying attention. They’re chipping away every day.

I am sure Cassie is enjoying some brother-free time. :) They’re far enough west as to not be under threat at all.

We had three bomb threats that week. I stood out on the grassy circle, alone.

Oh, my heart goes out to you!

Evening Julia, fine post as usual.

I’d worked a few hours in the lab, starting at four in the morning. I decided to walk back home, about four and a half miles. I got a phone call from a great friend of mine who knew I read a lot about Nidal and Laden. He told me of the planes, and the first building collapsing. The human toll did not hit me til I saw it on tv. So, I just started to ask all these questions about closing the airspace, Laden or Nidal, the way the tower fell… Got to my place, jumped in my car, went to see my parents. When I saw the replay of the first collapse, I got up and ran to the washroom. Spent that day, reassuring my folks that we were safe. My dad must have aged a few years that day, he didn,t want to show it, he really was never the same afterwards. Dementia set in then, I could be wrong. Later that night, a musician friend of mine called me, he was representing the province at a Québec event that was scheduled for the next few days. He was there, in an adjacent hotel, I’ll always remember his voice.

I’m going to call him now.

Betsy, hope you are doing better. Big hug.

Great work, Julia.

I recall showing up to work at the airport, stopping briefly in the parking lot to speak to the plumber who told me “I just heard on the radio that an airplane flew into the World Trade Center in New York”. No other details. My initial reaction was that it was probably an accident, some guy with very poor piloting skills in a small airplane. Things like that have happened before … a B-25 once crashed into the Empire State Building in the fog (about 6o years ago now).
I was on the airfield later, heard a pilot calling for a clearance, heard the controller tell him no clearances were being issued. Pilot then asked to depart VFR and was told no aircraft were being allowed to take off. That provoked a total WTF??!?! reaction. Went into the office, we turned on a TV, watched it the rest of the day. Nothing else to do, the airspace was totally shut down.

NYC had 4 tragedies in the last quarter of 01. I was also out jogging when the plane took off from JFK and then nosedived into a residential neighborhood of Queens. Think that was in November (too tired to look it up). The sirens then were going in all directions. I never tracked it down, but I think that fearing it was another terrorist attack, they were probably closing off all the bridges & tunnels into Manhattan.

Then, close to Christmas, there was a gigantic fire in the Episcopalian Cathedral on 110th St.

Then there were the anthrax attacks. I got a flu shot that year, and 3 other innoculations courtesy of NYC public health.

It seemed as though the rest of eternity was going to have a tragedy every other month.

Yes I can see that advice buy cheap radios for the police and firemen that operate on different frequencies so not everyone will hear the order to leave.
Then don’t warn the rescue workers about asbestos for which Rudy and the EPA head I think should face charges.
Then try and take credit for your success only Bush has used 9/11 for political gain more than Rudy some people just have no shame.

What do you do at the airport?

Don’t forget locating the command center in the WTC after the 1993 bombing, so Rudy could walk over & stup (sp?) his girlfriend there, and putting fuel storage there too.

teddy upstairs

Thanks Christine

On another note… I walked across Central Park later that AM to keep a haircut appointment. What else was there to do?

On the way back though, it was like a surreal dream. Friends/family kept calling my cell to make sure I was OK. We could hardly talk from the noise of the fighter jets screaming low over that beautiful,pastoral expanse.

Those are the moments when I sensed our world as Americans had irrevocably changed.

Julia – please send me email at

newtonusr
at
aol
dot
com

thanks

I clung to the New Yorker each week, read every obit for, what, months, in the New York Times. The Christmas holiday store windows were sad. How did you bear it, really?

My house and my office was on the flight paths into Sky Harbor Airport….. I can sit in my pool and watch the planes take the inbound run into the runways…. at work we saw them all the time….. direct in line for landing….. it was creepy with all the air traffic grounded….. the sky was empty….

It was last summer…. we sat at the taverna at the top of Lykavittos Hill in Athens Greece and all of a sudden….. I noticed it….. the sky was empty and silent…. Here was a city of 11 million and there were no light planes, helicopters and air traffic crisscrossing the sky…. it was the same feeling….

I called my pal at the National Gallery and asked him about the skies. He said, too, that they were filled with fighter jets. Here, we had them as well, and helicopters.

Dang and I forgot Michael Moore bringing those sick 9/11 workers to Cuba for medical treatment they were still not getting after how many years in America in his film “Sicko”.
Forgetting the 9/11 workers those who rushed to help after the buildings went down is the worse thing that Rudy and Bush have ever done… scratch that using 9/11 to get or try and get elected after ignoring the 9/11 workers is the worse thing they have ever done.
I want Obama to promise to pay for everything they need!

I work there. Airport management. Keep the runways from falling over, that sort of thing. Different airport now than back in 2001.

‘evening, all…
Julia, I was in Sarasota, FL, at work building the sailboat that would be the crown jewel of my former career, and listening to the rapturous radio coverage of Bush’s visit to a local school. First reports suggested an accident…then the second plane hit. Shocked and horrified, praying for all those in the target zone. As the confirmation of a terrorist attack became certain,I began trying to forsee the response. Knowing what was coming, my thoughts turned west, where my son had just graduated from Army Basic Training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.

I felt like we were living in one of those over the top action movies that opens on a holiday weekend.

However, the planes weren’t the most troubling part of that time. You could go home, close your door and block out the sounds. But you couldn’t escape the smell from the WTC site.

Horrible. And I hate RG, what a ghoul.

I was camping in the Cascade Mountains with extended family. We’d planned one last camping trip with my parents, knowing it would be the last due to their age. Being off season and midweek, the campground was almost empty.
The camp hosts kept circling around our site. Finally, they came down, apologized for intruding and said they thought we should know that the USA was under attack. It was an incredibly surreal moment.
We drove 25 miles to buy a newspaper because the radio reception was so spotty.
My husband is New York born and raised. Worked for years across from Battery Park. His pain made my heart break.
We decided to stay in the mountains for the kids” sake. The entire campground was empty that weekend – though it was officially booked to capacity. What a horrible time.
One of the things that haunts me is knowing how it felt to suddenly be under attack, and imagining what the Iraqi’s must have felt knowing they were going to be attacked.
1 million dead.

It’s odd how the smell gets to you and stays with you. I’ve been to a couple of aircraft crashes where there were fatalities and post-crash fires, and that’s a smell that stays with you. Always. And the stench of New Orleans rotting in the sun in the weeks and months after Katrina. That was so bad, one of the local radio stations took to running a promo that included a line about how nobody would ever again complain about the bad smell on Bourbon Street.

My wife and I both had home offices then and we had slept in late that day, getting up around 7:40 CDT. I was in the shower when the phone rang. It was our younger daughter, whose office was in 1 WTC. She said she was late leaving for work and that when her bus was coming down east Broadway when she heard a plane unusually low. A few seconds later the bus stopped in the middle of the street and the driver announced that a plane had just hit 1 WTC. The passengers got out and she immediately called us on her cell phone. My wife turned on the bedroom TV and called to me what had happened, so I got out of the shower dripping wet to watch. Soon after my wife handed me the phone we we all watched as the second plane hit 2 WTC, my wife and I via TV and our daughter watching in person. She soon signed off to try to get in touch with her then boyfriend (now husband), who worked in a building about two blocks south of the World Trade Center Plaza.

Meanwhile we were now also worried about our son, who was the reason why our daughter was late for work. He had been in New York over the weekend visiting his two sisters (they shared an apartment), and had been scheduled to fly back to the Twin Cities Monday evening. When he got to LaGuardia, however, he learned that his flight was canceled and that he had been rescheduled for one at 7:00 am. So he went back to his sisters’ place to spend the night. The airline website said the flight was on schedule, due in about 10:00 am, so I headed for the airport to pick him up as previously planned. My wife wasn’t too happy about that, thinking that the Mall of America, which I’d have to pass nearby to get there, might also be a target. I was just walking in the airport door when my phone rang with his call. He said he he had just landed in Green Bay and that all they were told is that it was because of “the national emergency.” After telling me that he said “What the hell is going on?”. So I filled him in. He signed off, saying he was going to try to find a way to get to the Twin Cities. Soon he was interviewed by a local TV reporter and she then gave him a lift to the bus station, where he was just in time to catch the bus. He arrived in Minneapolis about 7:00 pm that evening. Unlike many others, he was fortunate to make it to his destination that day.

We finally heard from our daughter again (both of them actually) when in mid afternoon they were able to place a collect call from a pay phone not far from their apartment, which was near Thompkins Square Park. Our daughter was one of about 1,800 employees working in offices on 3 or 4 lower floors of 1 WTC. “Only” nine were killed, as I recall, but one of them was a young Frenchman who worked in the cubicle next to her. It is believed he was on an elevator between floors when hundreds of gallons of flaming jet fuel deluged it. If she had caught her usual bus to work, she would have arrived at the Plaza about 8:50 EDT and very possibly would have been incinerated on an elevator as well.

I was at home getting ready for work watching the “Today Show”. Katie Couric said that a small plane had hit the WTC. They showed the footage almost immediately. Watched for a while and was watching when the second plane hit. My ex-boyfriend worked in Tower two. Was worried for his safety. Luckily he was a lawyer not a trader so he was not even at work I later learned.

Finally tore myself away to go to work because of course I was late at that point. Got to the World Trade Center in New Orleans where I worked which had been evacuated. Everyone was standing on the street just waiting. Then my co-worker got a call on her cell from one of our former interns. She was concerned for us because she didn’t realize there were multiple World Trade Centers and thought we had been hit. As they were speaking she screamed “Oh my god they hit the Pentagon!”.

At this point we were really shaken up. I had missed the meeting at the office the week before about what to do if there was a fire or incident. We were to meet at a designated place, but I didn’t know because I was out of town. The co-worker I ran into forgot about the plan I guess, so we went next door to the Hilton hotel lobby and watched CNN with a group of 50 or so people. We just sat and watched until the first tower fell. It was so surreal, like a dream. Then she remembered the plan and we went and found our co-workers. Luckily they let us go home. No work was going to be done on that day.

Unfortunately, there was more and more bad news that day. But for me it didn’t create the fear that the right wing has tried to stoke. I was resolved to not let the terrorists win. I had a business trip the next week throughout Texas. Arlines were not yet flying so I drove the whole trip New Orleans, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and back. If we stop doing what we do, they win. If we stop being who we are, they win.

Unfortunately the Bush and his buddies got the wrong message from that tradgedy. They have perverted our government into a criminal enterprise. It is about time we took it back. Go Obama-Biden! We need a government we can believe in and rely on to protect our rights not give them away. America needs a change! No more war of agression! No more torture! No more No Bid Contracts! We need accountability NOW!

Post 9/11 the media focused so much on the fires, rescue efforts etc. However, for all of us who lived there, it was the smell.

I had no reason to anticipate it nor way to cope with it — nor did any of my friends. But then again, you never heard it mentioned in the MSM coverage.

That day, and the resultant coopting of the tragedy, brought me lower than I could imagine.

It all unfolded that very day for me (and a few friends I talked to I might add), with those images set in the middle like a vision.

Had been asleep just a couple of hours, radio turned low per usual, when the words “White House” “evacuated” filtered into my dream.

Came full awake, thinking the problem was mainly in DC area, and called the DC-located brother within about one-tenth the time someone else had taken to respond earlier that day. Brother OK but not well-informed, except knew that there was also a problem in NYC; some distressed students of the brother’s had heard, and were concerned about family; one lost both parents in the towers, we later found out. Let brother go evacuate (office near State) after about two minutes, heard some tremendous crashing while called parents in another city to complete the phone chain.

Father answered and listened, while mother heard exclaiming “WHAT?!” in the background. Father says, “Go look at your tv; you just have to see it, the building has fallen.” So I did.

That’’s when the rage started. Stages, hell. Could almost feel things taking another angle down even as I watched the screen.

Fortunately, no one close to me was killed that day, though I’ve had close friends who worked in and near both building sites. Like some, I have had that strange spillover to other losses since —an aunt that Thanksgiving, who I knew had been very upset by the whole thing, and who left my father the last of 10; two of my oldest friends in separate fires a while later, one of which involved circumstances as deeply inexcusable in some ways as 9/11, though the number lost was far smaller: I’ve seen a funeral where everyone was as much ready to fight as anything.

The coherent thing I’m left with is the question: when life presents so many things to us that we have to deal with —natural deaths, the accidents of ill fortune— and the costs of those things is so very clear, what in the world is wrong with people who think that they can accomplish something through inflicting yet more on people?

A Chorale

Hey, folks. Thanks for sitting with me.

thanks for the post Julia

The coherent thing I’m left with is the question: when life presents so many things to us that we have to deal with —natural deaths, the accidents of ill fortune— and the costs of those things is so very clear, what in the world is wrong with people who think that they can accomplish something through inflicting yet more on people?

Exactly. Was a history major UG and did my masters thesis on FDR’s opinion of Hitler before our entrance into WWII. I knew I had learned intellectually about the darkest sides of human nature….but missed the emotional component.

It’s wholly another thing to watch those forces play out in bas relief…especially in one’s own backyard. I am firmly convinced that all of our responses to the tragedy of 9/11 are exactly what Osama bin Laden would have hoped/wished for.

But for me it didn’t create the fear that the right wing has tried to stoke. I was resolved to not let the terrorists win … If we stop doing what we do, they win. If we stop being who we are, they win.

Well said, indeed. Unfortunately, I think this administration has caused our nation to stop being who we are, encouraging people to wallow in fear while they trample the Constitution. It’s time to remember, to not be afraid, and to start being again the America that so many others admired us for being. It starts with pulling the “D” lever in November, and encouraging enough of our fellow citizens to do the same.

truth.

I was in Rock Center in my office in the morning and my secretary and I actually heard/saw a plane flying low down the Hudson River. Then another secretary saw the morning news describing a private plane impacting at the Twin Towers. Then all day we saw people walking up fifth avenue covered with dust. I stood on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the afternoon and saw the dark black cloud above what had been the Twin Towers.

Metro North began running again late in the evening and I took the train to Katonah train station which was covered with cops inspecting cars in the parking lot and I noticed anxious wives talking to cops and learned that many of the cars in the parking lot had belonged to husbands killed in the attack. It was a tragic scene and I stayed to talk with one woman who later learned her husband had been killed. Wives stayed at the station all night hoping their husbands would return.

It was a day off for me, and I was futzing around the apartment when I realized I’d been hearing sirens, off in the distance, for what seemed like an abnormally long time. Listened for a minute or two more, still hearing the sirens. Figured it was some sort of transit disaster (subway crash?) and flipped on the TV to find out, and that’s where I stayed for most of the rest of the day. My place is maybe twenty blocks from the Trade Center site, and I could have walked to the end of my street and watched the towers burn in person, but I wanted the distance the TV provided.

Just sat there watching, aghast. None of the newscasters seemed to know anything. I heard people yelling in my street at one point–went to the window, saw people spilling out of the brownstones around me and hurrying to the end of the block. Saw at least one guy in gray coveralls with a pistol in his hand, frantically waving people off the street. Turns out some fool left a step-van parked in the middle of the street, and someone else called it in as a bomb threat, so we had to vacate the block while the bomb squad checked the truck. (Fortunately my building is down the block from a big DHS/FBI/Secret Service/ATF office building, so we had help pretty quick.)

A thick, dirty, wet, smoke-smell permeated everything. My neighborhood, all the way down to the WTC site, was cordoned off–no vehicles or pedestrians allowed except police and emergency vehicles and personnel. Except, as the day wore into evening and overnight turned into sunrise, a double-file caravan of heavy construction equipment materialized–some of it brand-new, some crusted with dirt and mud, bearing license plates from all over the Eastern US–and parked along Sixth Avenue, silently facing downtown, toward the Hole.

The next night around 11PM, a friend called from LA, worried sick. Not so much about me, as about her 84-year-old mother who lived alone on the Lower East Side. Phones were out–would I go check on her? Made my way south through the dark, still streets, kept encountering security perimeters that blocked me from getting further south. Had to sneak all the way east to the river, found a hole in the security cordon and crossed under the Williamsburg bridge, plunged into the blacked-out area below Delancey, tripped and fell a couple times over unseen objects in vacant lots.

Stepped out of the gloom into a floodlit area, and the mother’s apartment building (full of elderly residents) was lit up by an emergency generator. She answered her buzzer, graciously welcomed me in as if she was throwing a party and I was the guest of honor, and we had a lovely visit. (Plucky and resourceful even though without electricity, she told me how she’d showed a much younger neighbor how to cook a potato on the gas stovetop.)

Heading home, I took Canal Street across town. Bare of traffic, like every other street, except for a seemingly endless line of massive dump trucks, heading nose-to-tail from the Hole to Arthur Kill to dump their loads of debris from the site.

It was a combination of eery familiarity and the disquieting awareness of everything changing–a new-found lack of safety. Kept a loaded pistol handy in the house for a short time. Knew it was silly and probably dangerous, but felt a little safer. Visited the site–a five-story pile of smoking construction rubble.

Sad how altered this country has become since then, at the hands of Bush and Cheney.

Hey all. Peace to you.
Thanks for the opportunity to share remembrance, Julia.
I don’t post here much, but look in often.

I had just dropped my girlfriend (now wife) off at her student teaching post in San Francisco. Turned the radio on and Bob Edwards slowly rolled out the scenario, I guess both towers were flattened by that time. I drove to the sunset district, parked and used a pay phone to ckeck in with a friend and my Mom. I was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital on Manhattan in 1961, so an attack on the island hits close, even though I can hardly stand more than a day in NYC these days. I’m just not a New Yorker anymore, but I sure was on that day and for many days after.

I’m also not a television person, especially regarding grotesque and horrifying events. I didn’t turn on a television until Friday of that week, when they were just starting to ramp the message around into We Will Destroy. Even listening to NPR coverage of the week, my sense was of seeing the giant crossbow of American military might being slowly drawn back and that there would be huge retaliation. Something Republican presidents are great about: the predictability of the military knee response, and then the demagoguery that goes along and convices a public that this response is natural, necessary and right. I was sickened and even expected Bush and Cheney to go nukular, but I guess they only got so far as Bunker Busting.

Pamela and I walked dazed around San Francisco and ended up in Washington Square Park in North Beach for some of the day, just seeking out a peaceful place. I cried a lot in the morning and was on the verge for several days. Sad for both they who had died and those who inevitably would from The Response.

I worked at a little NPR/Pacifica station in Mendocino County and had to make my way from SF up to Philo that evening to host a music show. Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge was beyond surreal, and yes I expected more hits and imagined it was on the list. As you might guess, the radio show was mostly a call-in talk out that night, letting people say what’s on their mind and I played a few Requiem like pieces and said a few things about sorrow for the souls forced to flee this life that day. Did I play Ivor Cutler and Linda Hirst’s “Women of The World”? I don’t recall.

“Women of the World take over.
Because if you don’t the World will come to an end.
And we haven’t got long.”

Best wises.
Owen

On August 11th, 2001, in Indiana, my previously asymptomatic 81 year old mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a large, aggressive, bilateral glioblastoma multiforme, essentially inoperable. I came from California, saw that her affect had changed drastically, and did not know what remained of her former self. In accord with her written directions, my father declined chemotherapy and radiation treatments for her, so she was moved from the hospital to a nursing home.

Though my father had years before suffered a mild stroke and thereafter, declining health, he had been well cared for at home by my mother, a registered nurse. Because could not live on his own, he too moved into the nursing home, where he shared a room with his dying wife of nearly 55 years. I returned to California.

My mother declined rapidly and steadily, and on September 7th, the hospice nurse said that she could die “at any time.”

On September 11th, I was asleep in California. My partner woke me holding the phone. “It’s your Uncle John,” she said “he wants to tell you that your mother died.” As she handed me the phone, she added “Oh, Chris called and said a plane has run into some building.” My uncle told me that my mother had died that morning, and that my father had had trouble trying to call me.

When I hung up the phone, I remembered having a childhood helium balloon and losing my grip on the string. Realizing instantly that I’d lost it, I watched my balloon float slowly up, grow ever smaller, and finally disappear. Then I remembered saying goodbye to my mother in August. Though I could see her, she was essentially gone. On September 11th, she finally disappeared.

I spent the next few hours staring at the television.

I was just gradually awakening the morning of 9/11 at my house in Arlington, VA after a rare night of perfect sleeping weather, with all the windows open. (I work a later shift, noon-8 pm, and so usually don’t get up before 10 am.) My non-live-in boyfriend had spent the night and had just gotten out of bed to pee, but I was still in bed and had just opened my eyes when I heard a huge explosion some distance away … the loudest I’d ever heard in the 20+ years I’d lived in this neighborhood. The roar was still echoing when the curtains by the open window on this otherwise still morning bulged with a sudden breeze, then went vertical again.

I thought it was likely an electrical substation 1/2 mile away next to a fire station, but oddly there was no sound of sirens for at least 15 minutes.

A few minutes later I was making coffee, the phone rang and a close-to-hysterical woman on the other end began shouting to turn on the TV, planes have crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon … it was my office manager on the 9-to-5 shift, and I didn’t even recognize her voice. As the TV came on, the first tower fell (but I think it was the CNN crew was still talking about two planes hitting the WTC, not about what was literally happening that moment, and as the ash cloud billowed away from the site I could make out only the one tower left standing). It took the TV folks a minute or two to realize one of the towers had fallen … and at that point there were only voice reports (no video) from the Pentagon, which included all kinds of fragmentary, unverified bits about a bomb going off at the State Dept., evacuations at the White House and Capitol, maybe the Metro subway system shutting down etc.

At which point the EMT/fire/police vehicle sirens were echoing nonstop off the surrounding hills. And several fighter jets suddenly roared low overhead.

Though I went to work that day a couple miles away in a western suburb, we were sent home after only a couple hours … I stuck to back roads and side streets, as the traffic on the main roads was rush-hour thick with people evacuating D.C. Like the rest of the nation, I stayed glued to the TV the rest of the day.

With time, I realized of course that the curtains bulging that morning was the shock wave from the Pentagon, over 3 miles away as the crow flies.

And I eventually dwelt on the sole time I’d visited the WTC (in 1987, with a friend from DC). We’d enjoyed the swift express elevator ride to/from the WTC 2 observation deck and spent over an hour up there on both the inside and outside decks, but after we’d left the building and were walking toward the Staten Island ferry, he remarked how relieved he was to be outta there. He said he didn’t usually have qualms about being on high buildings or bridges (though he was terrified of being in airplanes), but he’d had the strangest sense that those buildings would someday collapse — and though he didn’t feel it would happen in his lifetime, he intuited that I would witness it someday. (He was right — he passed away from AIDS in 1993.)