REMEMBERING 9/11

I was alone driving to work when the local radio station was reporting the 'accidental crash of a plane into the World Trade Center'. Then they broke in and said a second plane hit the second tower. The morning guy paused and said, "This is deliberate folks". I got to work and called my husband to tell him to turn on the TV.

I didn't get much work done that day.

Just stop it Foxfyre,

This is perverse. Your cheap propaganda is trasparent enough I am even willing to take the obvious risk to debunk it.

Stop using the tragedy of 9/11 as a cheap propaganda tool.

9/11 was a national tragedy. It doens't need to be trotted out every time the self-righteous "patriotic" Americans want to rally around the flag.

This kind of melodramatic tribute takes what at first was a Unifying event, and turns it into a very divisive and harmful political brickbat.

There are appropriate ways to remember these types of tragic events that respect the victims and help the families and that don't involve poltical threads and excessive flag waving.

These "memorials" are escpecially sick given the fact that we are now dealing with a worse national disaster.

Are you going to remember 9/02. I doubt it, since there is no flag waving and no enemy and no war to wage. I look forward to a "war on hurricanes" (which makes about as much sense as our current war).

Before you go off about the "un-patriotic liberals", you know damn well that you meant this thread a political jab. You posted a link from "gunstuff" website, into the politics forum.

I wish you would refrain from using 9/11 in such a shameful way.

I was at work, at the job before the one I have now. A colleague had a small portable TV (she and I both ran long database queries, there was little to do while waiting for the computers to churn so the boss didn't mind that S___ had a small TV). She had just become a grandmother than morning and so I was oohing and ahhing over pictures of her grandson when we both looked over at the TV and there was a special report.

I went to cnn.com and saw a headline about the WTC. I sent an email to RP as he is from NYC and worked in the WTC at one time. At that point, he could not get into the CNN website. Then S___ and I saw the footage of the second crash and were starting to get more worried. Other people were coming in to work and we'd corral them over, tell them, and soon there were about 20 people all standing in S___'s cube, leaning over this tiny television that was not much bigger than a Palm Pilot.

When the Pentagon crash was announced, I remember turning to someone, no one in particular, and saying, "That's an act of war."

We had a meeting later that morning, and someone tried to get work done but we were all too distracted and finally the boss let us go. It was something like 11 AM. We were right next door to South Station and I could have taken the trolley but they were all packed so I waited with maybe a hundred other people for a cab. That took forever and I ended up helping direct people in to cabs together so that we could all get out faster. I recall looking up at the buildings around, fully expecting them to all fall on my head.

Finally got a cab after perhaps an hour of waiting. Went home, sat in the comfy chair and turned on CNN. I knew RP was walking home as the transportation situation was ridiculous, everyone wanted to leave Boston and just get home, it was a very primal urge that day. RP finally came home, I think it was about four in the afternoon and we just hugged and hugged. Started getting phone calls that night, my folks, his folks, my brother. For a while there, we didn't know where one of my cousins was, or a friend of ours. Turns out they were both okay -- and our friend, 9 months pregnant, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with everyone else that day.

Planes flew overhead early the following morning, going, I believe, from Hanscom Air Force Base to the Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, and they scared the hell out of us.

Thanks for starting this topic, Foxy.

Pretty funny coming from someone who changed his avatar to an upside down flag the night of 11/02/04.

Talk about melodrama, LOL.

I don't mind making clear blunt political statements. My avatar was direct and intentionally inflammatory.

What upsets me is the manipulative use of 9/11.

I don't mind the political jab. I do mind using staged memorials of a tragedy to disguise it.

Just to be reasonable.

If Foxfyre or someone else wants to start a dignified 9/11 memorial thread, I would not be against it.

A dignified thread would be posted on a different Forum then "Politics".

A dignified thread would not contain a slick propaganda video entitled "America Attacked".

Who other than you is employing cheap propaganda ebrown? I am suggesting that it is fitting to remember a national tragedy and the deaths of 3000 Americans and American guests. Perhaps you think it should just be swept under the rug and never mentioned again. I don't. So I am politely asking you to take your propaganda to more suitable threads--there are dozen of them out there--and allow the rest of us a time to remember here.

a 9/11 memorial AND ebrown's avatar you mention seem like reasonable reminders of national tragedies to me.

What's the beef?

Ill give you the benefit of the doubt foxy.
We were driving an RV home from a month in MAine. I was sitting behind the wheel drinking coffee and listening to Howard Stern. We just crossed into New Jersey after pcrossing the Rhinebeck Bridge . Bababooey just entered the studio and announced that "aplane smashed into the WTC"
I dont even remember the miles after that. We made it home and could not remeber anything about the drive. Iknow we stopped at a PA Tunpike rest stop for coffee andpeople just sat there and we looked at each other stunned. There was a uniform disbelief and the beginning of a feeling that we are all going to be entering some terrible new phase of life.
I was a kid when Kennedy was shot and they all said how , that day, we lost our innocense. On 9/11, from about 1PM EDT on , we sensed that we lost our safety.

As family patriarchs and parents, we began to despair about how the lives of our children will forever be changed . We all rallied about our government and tried to find and hang on to the bright spots, like the timely leadership of Rudy Giuliani and the bravery of all those firemen and police.Then there was the bravery of the passengers of Flight 93.
The complete heartfelt embrace by the entire world was , to me, a needed comfort because we could not believe that we were hated that much that people would actually plot to kill our citizens as they went about their day.
We waited for and cheered the Bush speech at ground zero. We hung out flags and , like insane dogs, we vowed that those bastards in Afghanistan were gonna feel the "terrible swift sword"







Boy did we , in the subsequent years, dishonor the memories of those honored dead, the victims and the heroes. I can only say, Im really sorry that we let this schmuck lead us down his addled road . I often think of the people who died in the towers , in the Pentagon, the passengers on all the planes, the soldiers who bravely fought in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
Weve taken a sad and sacred moment in our history and soiled it with one mans hubris. Itll take history many years to assess how The Bush administration had manipulated this country by robbing from our bottomless well of selflessness as a nation.

If Bush were to be in a line up to greet people and I was there, I think Id spit on him. Nothing more, he only deserves spit.

Yes I remember with crystal clarity the events as they played on the radio, to the total exclusion of time for about 3 days subsequent to the attack.I also remember vividly, the scenes as the towers fell in that slow motion manner. Over and over we watched, we were transfixed.
All the while, the unsaid thoughts were "whats going to happen to us now"?

I remember that date since I saw those terrible pictures life on tv at my mother-in-law's birthday.

The war on terrorism started after that, and the number of what the U.S. government considers "significant" terroristic attacks more than tripled per year since that day.

< I wonder, too, why this thread is in 'Polics' and has as 'reminder' some stuff from "the shooters internet source.">

Thanks Jespah, JW, & Farmarman (even with the political jab stuck in), and Walter. It was definitely one of those events that sears itself into memory in a way that you can recall such minute detail four years later.

Along about 9/13 or 9/14, a website was put up showing tributes and memorials in other countries--people in nation after nation after nation with their symbols in flowers, posters, banners, etc. showing sympathy and solidarity with the USA. After a few frames of clicking through the photos, the tears were streaming. If it is still available I have long since misplaced the link.

I was sitting on my front porch in Arlington Virginia eating breakfast with my sister and my not-quite-two year old son. My daughter was still in my belly. We were eating french toast. I would normally have been on my way to work, driving right past the pentagon, but my sister was visiting, so I was lolly-gagging. My husband called from his cell phone. "They hit the world trade center!" Holy crap, are you sure? They say it was an accident, but how does that happen, I ask? That was no accident. Another call a little later -- "they hit it again!" My sister and I are talking about it, getting worried. We hear a plane flying really really low overhead. Planes flew over often because we lived less than a mile from Washington National Airport, but this one sounded way too low. I looked at my sister. Did that seem low to you? Yeah, it did.

My other sister calls later, crying. I dropped Bill (not his real name) off for a meeting at the pentagon this morning. And I can't reach him on his cell phone. I reassure her, the pentagon is a very big place. I'm sure that the phones are locked up with people calling. He'll call as soon as he can get out. Sister and I decide to drive to her house to wait with her. We wait for hours. She tries and tries but can't get through to his cell phone. Finally, he comes walking up the front walk. He'd walked all the way from the pentagon. He looked a little dirty, but other than that, he was fine. He and my sister had a long hug. He thanked me and other sister for waiting with her, went to the fridge to get a beer, drank it all in one breath and went to sit down. Sis and I left. I called work -- ok if I don't come in? No problem. We all got the day off -- paid.

I tried again and again to call my husband. His sister from overseas calls, wants to know if we are ok. I can barely understand her as I don't speak much of her language and she doesn't speak mine. But I get that they've heard and they're worried about us. I tell her we're fine. She asks for my husband. He's not here, but I'm sure he's ok. "Not here, no harm" is all I know how to say. She hangs up. My husband finally gets through. They've blocked off streets and he's stuck on K street and can't get out. I tell him to hang in there, he'll be fine, we'll wait right here. I start to worry he might get picked up in a sweep or something, but he makes it home in 3 hours time. We spend the rest of the day watching the news until we can't take it anymore.

I was in the spare bedroom (been kicked out there after a row the night before) and woke up to hear her calling my name. I knew there was something wrong. I went into the bedroom and she was sitting up in bed staring at me. "They flew planes into the World Trade Centre. Listen to the radio." She liked to listen to one of those froth and bubble two-headed breakfast shows that I hate with a passion. The bubble-heads were stunned and stumbling through descriptions of what had happened. My turn to be stunned.

Downstairs to turn on the tv and check the cable news. Amidst the horror I knew it was a world-changing event.

As with everyone else I still can't get those images out of my mind. You know the ones I mean.

I was getting ready for work, when my wife called me into the other room where she had been watching the news. They were reporting that a small plane had hit the World Trade center. We could see some smoke coming from the building.

I was casually watching the television coverage, when out of the corner of my eye I saw what appeared to be an explosion or fireball, and the reporter reacted, saying another plane had hit the other tower. I remember her saying, "We have a serious air traffic control problem here."

But of course we knew that wasn't the problem.

watch a slide show? Why on earth would I want to watch that again.....? I can't get the original images out of my mind even now.

It was pretty early in the morning pacific time, I was driving towrk and the broadcast was halted to goto some other news coverage. I started to look up at the sky to see if bombers or jest were being scrambled at the AFB here.

A couple days layer with all commercial air traffic cancelled I noticed some airforce exercise - looking up at the sky seeing a checkerboard of contrails.

Because as soon as soneone forgets, it's imperative to make them remember.
You see...some people need to be reminded with imagery why the "good fight" is being fought in Afghan.....uhhh....agains the Talib....um, no wait...Ira....
Nevermind.

uhhuh. Ok, I'll look at the pictures again when I can no longer remember them. But, someone will have to remind me to do it as I'll be senile then.

I was asleep. Ninety-fourth street. Upper East Side. Manhattan. The phone rang. I let the answering machine pick it up. It was my mother. "Turn on the TV. It's IMPORTANT!" I got up and answered the phone. I turned on the TV. Both planes had hit by then. I saw the smoke and the flames. While I watched, the first tower crumbled. It didn't seem possible. It didn't seem real. How could it be?

I tried to get to work, not realizing the significance of what was happening. I walked up Ninety-fourth Street. When I got to 3rd Avenue, I turned left and saw the smoke. Chills went through me. It was real. I went to the subway station, only to find that the subways were not running. I looked for a bus on Lexington and 96th, still wondering how I was going to get to work. Buses, full of people, were just zipping past the bus stops, not picking anyone up or dropping anyone off.

I looked up at the sky. It was such a beautiful, sunny day. Not a cloud in sight. It didn't seem possible that such a horrible thing could be happening. The sky was so blue. How could it be?