9/11 Where were you?

[Camarohusky]

Today marks 15 years since 9/11. 9/11 was the defining moment of the past 25 years. Its effect on politics and world relations has been immeasurable. From large things like geopolitics, political platforms, to a stark change from the optimism of the 90s to a fearful and pessimistic social outlook ever sice, to smaller things like changes airport visits and TV show themes, 9/11 has left an everlasting effect on our country and its politics. Not since the fall of the USSR had the international landscape been so shaken up and not since Vietnam had the political and social landscape been so shaken up.

To truly share and form what the event was like (espeically for the younger parton of this forum) please describe what you were doing on September 11, 2001, how you learned about the events, and what you felt.

I'll start. I lived on the West Coast, so the attacks occurred quite early for me. I was 16 and had zero period in high school which required me to be there at 7:30 Pacific time, an hour after the events began to unfold. I had no idea what was going on until someone came into class saying the Twin Towers were hit by an airplane. I brushed it off thinking it was a small plane like a Cessna that struck it in the fog, similar to the B-25 that hit the Empire State building 50 some years earlier. Slowly throughout the rest of the period and before my first normal class, murmurs began to grow that what happened wasn't minor, but was significant. For you young'ns, we didn't have smart phones so unless someone heard it on TV or the occasional kid had the legendary indestrucble Nokia "black box" phone of the time, they didn't hear it all. It was not until First period started and the kids who were able to watch the news before coming to school came in that I really learned what happened. We spent the rest of the day in our classes trying to do our best to both take in what had just happened and live out our normal school day. Half of my classes just sat and watched the news, the others tried to act as if it were a normal day. The prevailing feeling was a sort of blank cognitive dissonace. I guess it took time for the gravity of the situation to travel from East to West Coast. I remember being angry at the other kids who complained that we had to finish out the school day, as if that's all this was (they said it flippantly, not as if they were genuinely hurt).

It took a while for it all to sink in. I had always been a big architecture buff and loved big structures. It wasn't until a couple days later when I looked at a poster I had to the Twin Towers that it really hit me: the poster used to be an "is" and now it became a "was" and only because a few people decided for it to be so. Two months later my aunt died in the Midwest and our flight there was strange. The airport that had once been lively and almost a social place was little more than a graveyard. I chuckled it off, but it really hammered home that life was not going to be the same. Even then, it took me a few years (and a few leaps in maturity) to realize how dramatic the day was. By tht point, fear was the normal, war was on, and the US was a different place than the optimistic and materialistic 1990's in which I was formed.

[MasterStalker]

I was 14 and lived in Pittsburgh PA when it happened. I remember my mom took me and my brothers out of school and had us sit in the basement. It was a weird time when that was going on. No one had answers and speculation was off the charts. My mom is the type to buy all the various doomsday hype (Y2K bug was also supposed to kill us all), hence the basement. Things didn't improve either, when The pentagon was hit and the other one was downed in Somerset PA.

Geographically, I was 316 miles west of New York so it was still a "well we dont need to worry" mentality. but The Pentagon was only 190 miles away. When flight 93 went down we didn't know it was taken out. We were told it hit some other specific target and that was in Stoneycreek township which was only 60 miles away. That's when my city essentially went defcon-3 and bunkered in.

The major thing that stuck with me afterwords was how willing and ready we were to be afraid or give way to panic. I saw Arab owned stores vandalized. I'm a white kid that attends an all black school at the time and I could not understand at the time the full weight of the new racist that was sparked. At the time there was no fear of muslims, it was still strictly skin tone based. People who in one instance were talking about how they were kicked out of a store because the owner thought they were shady were instantly talking about "rag heads and sand n***ers", and my family and friends back in my oppositely diverse neighborhood were in total agreement. I couldn't and truthfully still cant reconcile it.

The other thing I thought was dumb, even way before Seth McFarlane took a jab at it on American Dad, was the terror alert system. How could they say it's yellow, but not have more info? how could we escalate to orange and still have no specifics? what the hell is the point in riling us all up for nothing? Why are we bracing for an outside possibility like my mom does for every Y2K and Rapture that people panic over? (This system really made her nuts btw. EVERY day was a day to panic) Who was terror alert yellow? It cant be the same for me as NYC, DC, LA,... Nebraska so where is this terror supposed to happen? But the adults just kept eating it up. As an adult I look back and I'm glad I was so inquisitive of stuff like that. Learning to question stuff has served me very well to this day.

[orangebomb]

I was in 6th grade, it was partly cloudy and I was on the bus when the first tower was hit, but I didn't see it until we got to school and actually saw the TV. Come to think of it, there were rumors flying around that something hit something, but I dismissed it as hearsay beforehand, until I saw the planes hit the building. Everyone kept rationalizing that it was a Hollywood stunt (my great-uncle actually said that before he died on 9/11. He fell down the steps in his house) gone wrong, until it was confirmed that Osama Bin Laden was the mastermind.

It was around noon or so did they let everyone out of school just in case there was another attack coming, which thankfully never came. Frankly, the whole town I lived in went to a near total stop for about 2-3 days, everyone was frightened that an unknown terror group (at least to the average joe) would attack in broad daylight (everyone forgot about the '93 bombings along with OKC) and try to destroy our way of life. A week later, there were American flags just about everywhere, and not long afterwards, terrorist "hunting" licenses were floating around, and there was clamoring for war in Afghanistan, which kind of started a phase where my friends and I would pretend that we're in Afghanistan gunning down Al-Queda, and what we would do if we caught Bin Laden.

Looking from a macro view, I can't help but think that a lot of us did become a bit cynical after nearly a decade of realitive peace and prosperity in America from '89-2000. That's not to say that there weren't negative events then (Waco and OKC comes to mind) but unless you lived near there, you forgot about it a month later or so. Once 9/11 hit, it almost feels like everything stated to get more and more gritty, edgy and the like, at least in between all of the ultra-patriotic glurge early on.

[DamnedByFate]

At 9/11/16 07:40 PM, Camarohusky wrote: To truly share and form what the event was like (espeically for the younger parton of this forum) please describe what you were doing on September 11, 2001, how you learned about the events, and what you felt.

I started school on that very day, so you can imagine a skyscraper collapsing on another continent was the least of my problems. I don't really remember much about that day. It must have been the first time I ever paid the slightest attention to world events, but as a first grader, I probably didn't understand anything.

[Ranger2]

I was in third grade. I didn't hear about it until around 2:00 central time, when my teacher told all of us to gather around because she had news to tell us. She said in a grim voice "today, two planes crashed into two very important towers in New York." I watched the wreckage on TV with my parents after school but I didn't understand what was going on. I remember though, kids were scared and at school would ask if planes would crash into the Sears Tower too.