9/11/01, ten years later.

[SR4]

i mean, it is pretty fucking rare it literally see a plane drive itself into a tower.

[SR4]

i remember it not really hitting me until I saw the people jump.

 

 

I don't care what your opinion is on the matter...imagining the fate they had resigned to is just terrifying.

 

 

 

I might also get flak for this and possibly agreement from some members for the wrong reasons, but I think this pisses me off more than it makes me "solemn" and reflective about it.

 

The towers are gone, thats a reminder. We have a memorial being built, thats a reminder. We hear people bring up 9/11 in just about every single thing to do with foreign policy, thats a reminder.

 

 

When I see the footage being conveniently trotted out for a bunch of 9/11 unedited, no commercial specials, it makes me sick to realize that companies are making BANK on these. It bangs the weak drum of emotional revenge-based patriotism and xenophobia (remember when there were shootings of Muslims in certain states in response to this?)...to drum up not "solemn" remembrance but rather emotional justification for the killing of a million other innocent people, that our wars and tactics, the destruction of Afghani, Iraqi, Yemeni, and American military families are justified.

 

I get so torn about it because any loss of innocent life is just deplorable in my eyes...and its a shame something like this brought the worst out in people's character.

[marf]

10 years has flown by! What a sucky ten years its been too. I hope the next are million times better. Maybe we'll finally get that mark of the beast. I could finally ditch my cumbersome wallet!

 

ps.. damn, some of you kids are young

[kaen]

i remember being on IRC at the time the planes hit, shit was going off. lots of reactionary bollocks and speculation etc

 

i also had an 800MHz cpu

[J3FF3R00]

some people died, all at the same time

 

woo..

 

 

I was about 20 blocks away. I was on my way to school at NYU in Greenwich Village. I was 22 and had been living in NYC for 2 years. I was walking downtown Broadway and remember looking up and seeing smoke in the sky and thinking it was a fire, but nothing serious. I stopped into a deli to get a jelly bagel and everyone was staring at the tv. The first plane had hit. At that time, everyone thought it was a stray 2-seater or something small.

I was late for class and figured I'd find out later.

No one interrupted out class and 4 hours later we walked out of the classroom and people were running down the halls, crying. I stopped and asked my guidance counselor what was happening. She said "2 planes hit the world trade center. both buildings collapsed. a plane hit the pentagon and I'm going to donate blood" and rushed off.

When I got out of the elevator, there was a crowd in the common room gathered around a tv. a few of my friends were there but they couldn't talk. they must have been in shock. none of the phones were working, so I couldn't call my parents, roommates or friends. I figured I'd go outside to see what was happening.

It was dead silent out and there were no cars in the street. People were standing dazed like zombies staring downtown at what now was a huge cloud of ash. I remember it was a beautiful day and I could hear birds singing. It was really creepy. That never happens in NYC, especially on broadway. The only traffic was on the west side highway and you could hear it because there were ambulances and fire trucks. That was also strange to be able to hear that far away.

I walked out into the middle of the street and as I crossed, an old woman came up to me and said "I'm sorry, but I need to hug someone". I gave her a long hug and she cried, then thanked me and walked off.

I bumped into one of my best friends and we walked back toward her place a few blocks away. We ended up going to another friend's apartment and smoking a bowl on the roof because we didn't know what else to do. We also figured that we might actually die soon, so why not. What else could you do? Everyone thought we'd get hit again. We watched the smoke and the sunset and then I slept at my friend's place because the subway was shut down and I didn't want to walk over the bridge to brooklyn in flip flops (it was the first day I had ever gone to school in sandals).

 

The next morning, I ended up walking over the bridge to brooklyn anyway, grabbing a few things from my place and heading back into the city to try to get a train out of town with some friends from Penn Station. They were stopping service later in the day so we felt we had to get out in case of another attack. At this point, the wind had started blowing north, so all of Manhattan was being enveloped in a cloud of ash. I can remember how it smelled. Like an electrical fire. We were running in the street away from the cloud because we were afraid it was harmful to breathe. I remember looking up at the empire state building thinking that a plane would slam into it as we ran by.

 

We got on a train and headed out to some suburb of new jersey where a friend of my friend's family lived. the town was affluent and as it turns out, many people who lived there commuted to the city to work in the towers. many driveways were filled with cars. when we arrived, I finally was able to use their phone to call my mom. She said they were taking my grandpa off life support in the hospital in Illinois and I should come home.

 

My friend's dad drove from cleaveland to NJ the next day to pick us up and drive us back to cleaveland. When we got there, I spent the night and a friend of mine drove out to pick me up and drive me back to illinois. The next week was spent watching my 91 year old grandpa die slowly with no food or life support, just humid air and morphine. The tv was on in his hospital room showing images of destruction. Those must have been his last memories. I stayed around for the funeral and went back to NY in early october.

 

When I went back, I found I had lost my job doing room service at a soho hotel. No big deal.

I was working on a project with a friend who's apartment was right around the block from the WTC. We went to his place but had to show his utility bills to the ARMY at canal street to even get there. The whole downtown of manhattan on broadway was like a nightmare or the aftermath of some transformers movie. dust, debris and mangled cars in the street. Tanks and soldiers with machine guns. We walked right by the WTC site when it looked like this...

 

 

It was crazy.

 

One of my strongest memories was parking a van in a garage nearby where people who worked at the WTC parked their cars. Even though a month had passed a lot of their cars were still there, covered in ash. Some people wrote messages with their fingers in the ash like "not forgotten".

I remember someone had cleared a spot on the windshield of a car. I looked in and the inside of the car was clean. There was a cup of coffee and a newspaper from the morning of september 11th. It was as if everything was preserved like on display in a terrarium, only it was just circumstance. Very sad.

[kaen]

tldr, was the any point in quoting me?

[jules]

fucking a jefferoo that's some nice recounting there, I can still feel and recall that day like it was yesterday. I was 25 and going to a design school in Montclair, nj. we had a clear view of the NYC skyline as it was probably about 15-20 miles away. I was in my photography class and we were presenting our final projects. a buddy of mine who lived in jersey city (directly across the river from world trade) had done his final on the towers. he had beautiful shots from the sunset the night before that he had just developed. on our break from the class we went outside to smoke a cig and there were swarms of people in the street staring across the river at the wtc. there was smoke billowing out of the first tower and people were saying a small commuter plane flew into the building. it seemed like it was no big deal but we stood and watched. I do remember it being a perfect warm, clear sunny day.

 

while we were standing there a plane flew by that seemed either unusually loud or unusually low but we still didn't seem phased but the hair on my neck was standing up. it was such a weird vibe. next thing was a Hollywood explosion and you could hear the collective gasp from everyone in the street. my face felt numb but it didn't seem real at all and I was unusually calm. I remember thinking that we were moments away from seeing a mushroom cloud or something ridiculous. people started panicking around us and I felt line my feet were part of the sidewalk.

 

there were tvs on a nearby laundromat and they were saying that planes had hit dc and we were under a full scale attack. they were reporting that f-16s were intercepting 6-7 planes that were still in the air and they were going to shoot them out of the sky. they were saying this while showing bodies falling from 1000 feet in the air. I remember this pit in my stomach because the people falling were not flailing about. they were just gracefully plummeting to their chosen way of death. you could gear these giant crashes on the news report which later turned out to be the bodies falling through the glass at the bottom near the entrance to the towers.

 

all of our cell phones were dead but we decided to head to a nearby park that had a high overlook of the city. we watched the first tower drop with our own eyes. it was then I decided I needed to head home. Howard stern was the most poignant and well spoken person I have ever heard at that moment. he was fucking brilliant. when I got home my parents were telling me that our family in the area were all ok. my dad was staring at the constant replay of the tower swallowing the plane and he had this tear on his cheek that still haunts me to this day.

[Guest Z_B_Z]

senior year of high school. i was in the dark room developing pictures. when i came out cnn was on and the towers were smoking.

 

thanks for that youtube vid KY.. probably the best thing ive ever seen produced on 9/11..

 

its still weird to think that actually happened.. also weird that its been ten years..

 

tldr, was the any point in quoting me?

 

someones having a bad day

[Guest rumbo]

i remember being on IRC at the time the planes hit, shit was going off. lots of reactionary bollocks and speculation etc

 

i also had an 800MHz cpu

 

I was in IRC too.It was around 11:00 pm here. Some dude said a plane flew into the tower and my first thought was that it was a commercial air traffic accident. Like a small plane fucked up. I stayed up all night watching the rest of the events. With all that has passed since, the single biggest beneficiary of this event seems to be right wing shareholders of contracting firms tasked with rebuilding what the US military destroyed, at grossly inflated rates.

 

War is a racket.

[vertsk8er419]

makes me sad and solemn thinking about all the heads fixated on TVs watching death LIVE on news channels that are at their most useful in such times, all the expected reactions of fear, guilt, honor, duty, and depression, to feed the grand spectacle. the whole phenomena and cultural reaction just makes me sick... how our culture(s) have integrated the medias depiction into new models of entertainment, politics, and business, how people still choose sides... i need to stop thinking about it really.

[Guest Z_B_Z]

dude it was sad a lot of people died. dont get caught up in the political spin bullshit

[SR4]

makes me sad and solemn thinking about all the heads fixated on TVs watching death LIVE on news channels that are at their most useful in such times, all the expected reactions of fear, guilt, honor, duty, and depression, to feed the grand spectacle. the whole phenomena and cultural reaction just makes me sick... how our culture(s) have integrated the medias depiction into new models of entertainment, politics, and business, how people still choose sides... i need to stop thinking about it really.

dude it was sad a lot of people died. dont get caught up in the political spin bullshit

 

yes. very yes.

 

 

people died, and people died horribly. Any loss of life is meant to be lamented.

 

I think part of the impact regardless of media spin/projection is just how odd the whole situation was, I mean if you think about it, two jumbo jet-airliners crash directly into two of the tallest towers in the world. This is not a common occurrence.

 

Jefferoo, that is insane...awesome post man.

 

 

I gotta say guys, I am feeling the WATMM love these past weeks...lots of great insightful posts.

[vertsk8er419]

don't worry guys i stopped thinking about it

 

 

lol i feel the love, this is now the feel the watmm love thread. meaning: more insightful posts

[OneToThirtySix]

I fell asleep in my Current World Problems class. The teacher was pissed.

 

edit: Less than three hours after the first collapse.

[SR4]

I was in an internet cafe downloading beats from phatdrumloops.com to 3.5' disc's when the event was unfolding, a stranger next to me bumped the news and said shit was going down. I said 'karma'.

 

 

I would say a more realistic karmic equivalency would be if half of Western Europe/North America was destroyed.

[azatoth]

I had just finished school and was browsing a book store with a friend when another friend called and said that the Pentagon was on fire and some skyscraper was also burning. Intrigued, we went to a nearby cafe with a TV and they were showing CNNs live coverage on a big screen and sat there for a couple of hours drinking coffee and watching the events unfold. Remember talking with my friend that shit is going to change and the Yanks are going to start a war somewhere. And also being not that surprised by the attacks either, with all the escapades the US has done all over the world, it was inevitable that they would get hit back by someone.

[zazen]

I was in London, in an office. One of the staff suddenly looked up from her monitor, looking very scared, and said "A plane has flown into the World Trade Centre". Not having ever been to NY, I didn't really know what the World Trade Centre was. I got onto Yahoo News to try and find out what was going on, but the internet was slowing to a crawl as millions of people all over the world tried to get to CNN.com or Yahoo. The yahoo home page had a red headline and a small pic of the towers, but all the other links were failing.

 

Caught up with the news over the next few hours. Down in the office reception they had a TV wired up with CNN on it, a small crowd of people watching. One of the guys there was a New Yorker, watching the screen very distressed. Someone asked him if he'd heard from his loved ones, and he just sadly said thay he couldn't get through to anyone, lines were all jammed.

 

At home I didn't have a TV, so I was spared the infinite traumatising re-runs of all the footage. Even now, I have probably only seen that clip of the plane hitting the second building a small handful of times - like when it was used in Michael Moore's doc.

 

The next few days in London were eerie - they stopped all flights here too, which made London oddly quiet (you get used to the sound of planes and then when its missing you notice it). Everyone was tense, because no-one knew what would happen next or what Bush would do next.

 

As Chris Morris memorably put it six months later: "George W. Bush formulates a measured response… which turns out to be the most expensive bollocking ever unleashed against shepherds."

 

I watched some of the doc KY posted, scary stuff. The parts about 1hr into the doc where people are running from the smoke and rubble are really scary.

 

In the first few hours it seemed like there was going to be huge number of deaths - hundreds of thousands. In the days after the event, when it came to light that only 3000 people had died, it was pretty unbelievable. But if you imagine what 3000 people really means, thats still a lot of people.

 

I agree with Smettingham - "people died, and people died horribly. Any loss of life is meant to be lamented."

[zazen]

Some forums have history going back far enough (XLT, metafilter) - if you look through you can find the original threads that people posted as the thing was happening. Thats pretty interesting/scary reading too.

[Muflontillah]

Since it´s my 28th birthday today, ten years ago I was celebrating too. On 11th of September I was recovering from a great party that my schoolmates prepared for me, which took place on a high school swimming camp somewhere in northeast Italy. It was something around 7 pm when we heard the news. Whole place consisted of small cottages and while we were cruising on borrowed bicycles we stopped by a small crowd of people (mostly Slovak and Polish), that were lamenting near by a TV that someone took out of their place and arranged it on a high wooden stand so everybody can see what´s on. I remember that I saw one tower falling and then we went away. One of my friends went nuts biking around the camp telling the news to everyone he could find.

[kakapo]

I'd lived in NY state a couple of years previously and knew Manhattan well and had a few friends, both american and brits, living there at the time. I was home in the UK flicking between channels. What was strange was the gap between the live footage and the news commentary, which meant I was watching with my own commentary and corrections. It was clear that the reporters didn't have a clear grasp on the geography or the scale. Those of you who have who have been to the WTC will remember how they used to warp perspective, not just because they were big, but because they were so much bigger than the other very large buildings around them. They (bbc i think) didn't actually show the footage of the first tower collapsing but switched quickly to the cloud of dust, and the reporter was obviously dumbfounded and kept repeating that it appeared there had been a third explosion, seemingly unaware of what had just happened, when it was clear that the scale of the dust cloud could mean only one thing.

[Guest glasse]

I was listening to this.

http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=331338

 

Not really, I was at work. Strange coincidence though, that album. Aug 27, 2001 US release.

[lumpenprol]

i remember it not really hitting me until I saw the people jump.

yeah the whole people jumping thing really hit me in the gut too. Strangely on the day it happened and for the days afterwards, I somehow missed the footage of people jumping (I do remember an eyewitness on the ground saying they heard the bodies hitting around them, but there was no footage). It wasn't until a bit later when I saw a Time magazine with a photo of one of the jumpers on the cover. I was surprised at my reaction, it really made me feel like crying. Like you said, imagining the desperation of the people, to take the leap. Of course, it wasn't long until Photoshoppers got ahold of those images and did the inevitable "tandem jump" images, and others...

[chassis]

As bad as I feel for the friends and family of the people in the attacks. Its so very hard to feel very sorry for America considering the civilian casualties in Iraq were over 100,000 according to some figures. Deaths are a cause for mourning all the time, but theyre not an excuse for more death. And that number is excluding people who were actually fighting in the wars.

 

Just goes to show that the average people who are just fucking going to work, that get fucked over.

[Terpentintollwut]

I've never seen the footage of people falling, except for one gif some motherless sonofa posted on watmm roughly a year ago which I quickly scrolled over once I had realized what it was. Whether you're all about 9/11 conspiracy shit or are sick of the US-reaction to the whole thing, like I am, it's still just disrespectful to show people like that. I think the German media decided not to broadcast these, let alone put them on a magazine cover ...

 

I must have been 11 years old. I came home from school, poured a bowl of sugarpuffs and my parents were watching the news. I didn't really know what was happening or why it mattered. I think I was probably pissed off I couldn't flick over to some angry beavers on nickelodeon >:0

 

pretty much how I experienced it. I was pissed off at something before, don't remember what it was, so when my mother said "Strange thing is happening, two planes separately crashed into the same building in NYC", I think I even said "I don't give a shit" or something. Then later on I realized it was some actual fucked up shit going down when they interrupted the stuff I was watching o tv, and some postwoman who was on her route came into our house and watched the tv for some minutes. I don't remember the rest that well, but I was still a little angry I couldn't watch my shows ... kids can be real assholes sometimes.

 

i saw the second plane hit

was in a us gov't class, taking a quiz

i basically thought "oh shit how many of my friends are going to die because of this"

10 years later the answer is 2.

 

you mean they died that day or in the whole war shit it resulted in ... ?

 

Since it´s my 28th birthday today, ten years ago I was celebrating too.

 

Happy Birthday! (this is not sarcastic or anything I'm literary just saying happy birthday to you.)

[Hautlle]

I woke up for my first lecture of the day and saw the first plane had hit, basically saying it was a freak accident or whatever. Then as I was watching the news they were like "OMG another plane just hit the towers" and I was just like "WTF?!" went to my lecture but it was really short because the teacher wanted to see what was happening. I think I'll blame 9/11 for me not being able to pay attention for the rest of the semester which led to me dropping out of Uni. for over 5 years.

 

Fucking terrorists won...