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Jan 25, 2012Comments: 8 · Posts: 20090 · Topics: 685
It still brings tears to my eyes.
I Remember feeling scared, confused, helpless, pain, heartbreak, nervous and overwhelming compassion.
The country came together. That day and for a while afterward there was no race division, no generation gap, no sexual identity division, no religious division, etc. We were all Americans feeling the same thing.
Soon after though there was a high suspicion of middle eastern Americans which i felt wasn't fair. Some were treated with hostility and I remember feeling compassion for my friends and acquaintances that were treated as such.
This thread is just about remembering the feelings and not to discuss the right or wrong of what happened.
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Dec 01, 2015Comments: 33 · Posts: 5490 · Topics: 118
At first, I thought it was a movie on the screen.
Then, I felt sad. Just like I did about any other tragedy of human on human violence.
Then I felt scared about what the government would then feel justified to do.
Sad thing is: there are countries that experience "911" on a daily basis, and it's important to me to have that perspective.
Hatred cannot drive out hatred.
The governments are not our friends. It's important to question things.
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Jul 24, 2016Comments: 605 · Posts: 5516 · Topics: 158
I remember being in 7th grade....all the teachers stop teaching and a middle size box tv was rolled in on a black cart ...we watched the news ...I did not really understand the gravity of what happened ...or what was going on ....I remember the teachers being upset ...and few kids ...but a lot of us were confused ...
only a few days later is when I really started to understand ....that people had died ...I still wasn't fully aware of a the fact that it was a terrorist attack or the mass fear or hysteria that would ensue ..the war or anything else that would follow after ...
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Sep 20, 2008Comments: 1470 · Posts: 13777 · Topics: 204
I was in class and one of my classmates who slept in that day entered the classroom and briefly mentioned seeing it on the news.
Thought nothing much of it, not unlike when shit happens in Afghanistan or Somalia... that is until everyone kept making a big deal of it on the news in the following days.
It's the event that marked the transition from childhood to adulthood for me, politically speaking. My eyes were opened and the world wasn't black and white anymore, but grey and uncertain.
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Jun 13, 2006Comments: 5 · Posts: 3103 · Topics: 77
I was confused, "what a hell?".
I was at work, my first job out of college. My boyfriend at the time attended Fordham in the Bronx and I had just flew back days before. We stayed at the Hilton next to the towers, went to that Krispy Kreme etc. I was talking to him that morning when the first plane hit. He saw it from his sister rooftop in NYC. We were evacuated in downtown Cleveland after the 2nd plane hit, We all saw the plane that was flying towards DC, the 4th one that crashed in PA. I WILL NEVER FORGET that. Still saddens me 15 yrs later.
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Feb 16, 2015Comments: 1 · Posts: 6172 · Topics: 7
My alarm went off at 6:30am and I lay in bed listening to the radio. The morning talk guys were talking about what was going on (the first plane had already hit and I'm not sure if the second one had yet) and I thought it was some kind of joke they were playing. Then when they said there was some military action or something at the Pentagon (an explosion of some kind) that the US was under some kind of attack, I was in shock.
Got up and immediately went downstairs and turned on the TV.
Couldn't believe what I was seeing.
My dad had almost died a few months back and had recently been released from the life therapy ward in the hospital, and my mom called freaking out because she didn't know if she could handle being alone with him amd deal with her fear of what was happening. At this point, no one knew if this was limited to just those planes or if this was a large scale attack from someone like China or North Korea (we live in the Pacific Northwest).
I had a feeling it was Osama bin Laden, I don't know why other than terrorist threats abroad had been more frequent.
I got ready and went to work at 9 and it was surreal; no one talked and we had no phone calls. Everyone was one edge and depressed. I remember keeping my TV on the news constantly, and after a while started wondering when they would stop having that ticker-tape news update at the bottom of the screen. They never did. It's something that still reminds me of how much things have changed since 9-11.
Another thing about the days after that that sticks with me about it was how QUIET it was when they suspended all air traffic. I lived under a heavy air traffic "highway" and about 3 miles from a small municipal airport. As soon as one plane passed over head, 2 more in line were over the horizon. The absence of that for weeks, and how incredibly quiet it was was disconcerting. It sort of put me off balance for a while. Even my cats seemed to react to it.
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Oct 17, 2013Comments: 374 · Posts: 8645 · Topics: 308
I was on my way into work that morning, and on the radio they broke in and announced that one of the towers had been hit, but by a small airplane. I thought that ATC or the pilot made a serious f-up. Tragic, feeling bad for those most likely died.
Didn't think too much of it.
At the place I worked at at the time, a group of us would go to the cafeteria to get breakfast. As soon as I got in, fired up the computer and we went.
We had to walk through the plant to get there, and about half way was a break room with the television on CNN. Once I saw the smoke coming out of the tower, I knew it wasn't a small plane that hit, We were watching when the second plane hit, obviously a jetliner. My jaw dropped. At that point, I knew we (the US) was under attack. So now I was "oh shit".
So, you can imagine what was talked about at breakfast. We stopped again at the break room and were watching for a bit, no one talking, when the news scrolled across the screen that the Pentagon was hit by another jetliner.
Concern became anger at going after the bastards behind it.
Not much work got done that day.
Went home and stayed pretty quiet, except for the anger at reports of people celebrating the attack, even here in the US. Its probably a good thing I wasn't around where that was happening.
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May 05, 2016Comments: 238 · Posts: 2097 · Topics: 26
My parents (who are religious) were telling me that it was the end of the world. I was 7 at the time. And I remember that there were images online suggesting that the smoke coming from the buildings had faces of the devil in them. I also remember the TV showing bodies falling out of the buildings too.
It was absolutely horrifying and tragic.
There's this book called "extremely loud and incredibly close". It's about the loss of communication and a boy who loses his father to the terrorist attack that happened on 9/11. He reflects on all the times his dad asked him what was wrong and he'd say "nothing..." And then he remembers on 9/11, when he listened to all the messages that were left by his dad on that day, the last message he tried hearing was all static.
The main character's grandpa also had a medical condition where he was losing the ability to say certain words...words like "want", "yes", "no", "and", "help..." Finally, the last word he couldn't say was "I"
It's a deep book that makes you reflect on the last words you'd ever say to your loved ones.
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Jan 10, 2015Comments: 1877 · Posts: 16918 · Topics: 108
I was in 5th grade, the tv came on in class, the teacher got a call and ran to turn off the tv. The kids started getting picked up by their parents, but many including myself was left there because our parents felt we would be safer at the school. Then I got home and my parents explained what happened and I remember it being all over the news for months.
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Dec 20, 2015Comments: 792 · Posts: 1721 · Topics: 95
I was 18 and already graduated when it happened. My grandpa told me to come see what was happening and I saw the first tower smoking. Went outside and I saw multiple jet trails all in circles.