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11 September 2001

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vison
Post subject: 11 September 2001
Posted: Tue 11 Sep , 2007 4:23 pm
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I don't know if this is a good idea, but here is a thread for September 11, 2001. I mean it as a memorial thread and hope that it is not taken over by argument.

Today when I turned on the radio the very first thing I heard was the initial CBC report of the events of that awful morning. I knew instantly that it was a re-broadcast, but the shock and horror and dismay swept over me almost as strongly as they did that terrible day. I remember listening in disbelief, then running to the living room and turning on the TV.

Who could ever forget the dreadful images of that time? Today I am thinking of those who died and of those who lost loved ones. Today I am thinking of a great city, the greatest city the world has known, the hub of modern civilization, and the strength and courage of the people who live there.

That day changed our world, and nothing is ever going to be the same.

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The Watcher
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Posted: Tue 11 Sep , 2007 6:26 pm
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To be honest, vison, I would prefer that it sort of remain unspoken and unhyped, all I see on the news today is bad and schmaltzy dredging up of very painful wounds for what I guess I see as very little result.

Just my take on the whole thing. Not that it should be forgotten, but it needs to be within its proper context, and at least the politics here will currently not allow such a thing to occur.

Is it any coincidence that Petraeus and the WH are trying to put some huge positive spin on Iraq for example? Then we get the overkill coverage on some vague and totally meaningless OBL tape about Western efforts and his hopes for us all to embrace his form of Islam. To be honest, I do not want to hear from ANY of them any longer, the sick huckster type spins on the anniversaries of this date make me ill.

I am going to enjoy the sunshine and the brisk air and forget about all of the other crap for today. I need to.

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vison
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Posted: Tue 11 Sep , 2007 6:44 pm
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:love: :hug:

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EdaintheRanger
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Posted: Mon 17 Sep , 2007 11:03 pm
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Hmm this 11th September aside from the one "where were you on 9/11?" It was hardly mentioned.

I feel sad when I think of that day: like it was an end of an age. Yet at the same time I feel a renewal of the resolve in my heart to not give in to terror, I'm not going to change my way of life to suit some bogeyman. But like you say I don't want to be drawn into an arguement, just trying to describe some of the feelings I feel around the time of 11th September.

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TheMary
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Posted: Mon 17 Sep , 2007 11:09 pm
I took the stars from my eyes, and then I made a map, And knew that somehow I could find my way back; Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too - So I stayed in the darkness with you
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This was the first year I didn't watch the news coverage of whatever memorials were happening. It was the first year I didn't cry, but I'll never forget. How can I?

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Riverthalos
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Posted: Tue 18 Sep , 2007 5:53 am
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I didn't pay much attention to the memorials this year either, but I didn't forget. Unless something really bad happens to my brain, I will never forget.

It was such a beautiful day. I remember that so well. It was such a beautiful day, and I overslept, and didn't check the news. The planes hit while I was still in bed, the towers came down while I was in class, and I found out when I came home to get my stuff together for my next class. I remember watching over and over on one of the televisions in the main computer lab/study area, the planes hitting, the towers tumbling, the dust, the smoke. That the Pentagon had also been hit, and another plane went down in PA just made it all the more surreal. It was such a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky, but after the news broke and the magnitude of the events sunk in, it seemed as if the sun itself had dimmed, and everything looked different.

My campus got hit pretty hard. Lots of students were from NYC or DC. Morale hit the skids for a while. It didn't help that one of our alumni was on the infamous Flight 93, and was one of the leaders in the charge. My sister was at NYU at the time, and the disruption there was far far worse. She got evacuated from her dorm and spent three days living in the school gym along with a few hundred other students. The school handed out free toiletries and other sundry items because noone had time to pack anything.

One month later, my school held its 150 year anniversary celebration as planned. There were three days of festivities. The theme was freedom, and we were having speakers and performers coming in with presentation encompassing that theme. It was sheer serendipity that freedom should be our theme as the event was scheduled and planned long before 9/11/01. Remember how everyone was afraid to fly? Well my dad decided that the best way to address the issue of terrorism was to give the terrorists the finger and fly across the country to visit me on that weekend. My brother came along. I was in the campus orchestra, and we performed that weekend. I don't remember the whole program, but we did the William Tell Overture. We didn't get to rehearse the William Tell much because the other music was so challenging, and the conductor almost dropped it altogether, but the principle cellist sent an e-mail two days before the dress rehearsal saying something to the effect of "Come on guys, we have to do this." I'd played the William Tell before, and so had just about everyone else in that orchestra. We knew when to get loud, when to get soft, when to speed up, when to slow down, all us strings knew how to, at the very least, fake our way through the ricochet bowing, and so when the conductor took us through it at the dress rehearsal, the first time we'd ever rehearsed it, we nailed it, and we nailed it again at the concert that night. It was not the most powerful musical experience I've ever had, but it was up there.

I went to NYC for Veteran's Day that year, and paid a visit to Ground Zero. I got withing two blocks of the hole. This was two months to hte day after the towers fell. I saw the impromptu memorials attached to the fence at St. Paul's cathedral. I saw the workers coming in, the most exhausted people I've ever seen. I saw a building with its side blown off and girders exposed, all twisted. It made me think of entrails. I saw a shop window, with shoes on display. All the shoes were silvery grey. At first I thought it was the latest fashion, but then I realized it was just the dust. And the smell. I'll never forget the smell. I'd heard about it on the news, days after the towers came down, that the place stank. Well, two months later, it still stank. It smelled like burned metal and death.

NYU had long since got itself back on the rails by then, but my sister didn't have internet in her dorm, and her phone service was spotty. All the communications gear for that section of Manhattan had been on top of either WTC 1 or 2.

Sorry about the brain vomit. The previous posts just made me think back to the day, and try and recall what it was like at the time.

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Voronwë_the_Faithful
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Posted: Tue 18 Sep , 2007 2:14 pm
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Thanks for sharing, River. :)


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Lidless
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Posted: Fri 05 Oct , 2007 12:16 pm
Als u het leven te ernstig neemt, mist u de betekenis.
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I was in the World Trade Center near an international airport, and on the second highest floor.

Luckily it was Amsterdam.

A nervous day indeed.

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Crucifer
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Posted: Fri 05 Oct , 2007 3:45 pm
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My uncle was on one of those flights the previous day...

Not a day I'll forget soon.

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LalaithUrwen
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Posted: Fri 05 Oct , 2007 4:00 pm
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I think it's good to remember. Someone sent me a nice music/slideshow thing that made me pause to reflect and shed a few tears.

River, I liked reading your remembrance of the day.

It was early here (for me anyway). I was up early, though, to go visit my friend who had just had a baby. This was going to be the first time I saw her, so I was quite excited. My mom was going with me, and she's the one who first said, "Something awful is going on in NY. Turn on your TV." I think she called me on her cell phone on the way to my house.

So I turned it on. Watched it for a while. This was the time when only the first plane had flown into the first tower. At the time, we thought it was an accident still.

We went to my friend's. We oohed and ahhed over the new baby, all the while watching what was going on in NYC. We watched the second plane fly into the second tower.

It was terrible. We watched them fall. We heard about the other flights--the one into the Pentagon. And then the one that crashed in Pennsylvania. It came as far as Cleveland, iirc.

Seeing those buildings fall was probably the worst thing I've ever seen.

I came home from my friend's house and woke up Freddy. (He was working midnights then.)

Then Air Force One was flying overhead somewhere and fighter jets came through to clear the air space. They caused a sonic boom which scared the absolute crap out of everyone in the area. (We learned what actually happened much later.) We all thought a bomb had gone off or that another plane had crashed somewhere. (I think there were still a few unaccounted for planes at that time.)

It was definitely a traumatic day, and I didn't have anyone I knew personally involved anywhere. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for those who did. One thing I liked about this recent music/slideshow is that it included lots of pictures of family and friends waiting for news, grieving at Ground Zero, at funerals, etc. It was very sad and poignant, but a good reminder of the human element of this whole tragedy.

All of that led into FotR, if you guys remember. I think it was one of the contributing factors as to why this movie affected me the way it did.


Lali

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The Watcher
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Posted: Fri 05 Oct , 2007 4:52 pm
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I don't disagree with remembering the day, I do find fault with obsessing over it. People did not let Pearl Harbor affect their view of the Japanese people for eternity, actually now, ironically, we have quite good relations with ALL of the countries who perpetrated WWII. And after WWII, we were led into something FAR more dangerous in my eyes, the decades long era of The Cold War. Even then, through the worst of it, America went through some shameful things, Japanese-American relocation camps, the McCarthy blacklists, J Edgar Hoover and his spying on Americans, and what bothers me so much is I thought we had learned and moved on from those sorts of ways of thinking and responding. Living in fear and paranoia and willing to always expect the worst is no way to go about changing the world for the better.

It seemed like an eternity at the time, but, heck, I was only born 15-16 years after the end of WWII. I lived through many of the latter day events that I mentioned, and I saw the hope and enthusiasm that arose when Eastern Europe and Russia broke free of their fetters, I saw the Berlin Wall get torn down, I saw Vietnam start to recover, I saw China start to defrost a bit. Why do we so easily forget how much GOOD has transpired over the last fifty years? America is only suspect in most of the world's eyes if we continue to ACT that way. Fine, fight terrorists, that is a GOOD thing, but maybe not how we are taking ON that fight.

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Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 miles per second, is a cow that has been dropped from a helicopter.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

- Dave Barry


Glaciers melting in the dead of night and the superstars sucked into the supermassive...
Supermassive Black Hole.

- Muse


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TheEllipticalDisillusion
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Posted: Sun 07 Oct , 2007 5:49 pm
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I've never watched the memorials. I got enough of those images of that day on that day. I remember where I was, what I was wearing and what I said on that day at the very moment that the towers fell. I have all of the memorial I'll ever need.

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Lily Rose
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Posted: Sun 07 Oct , 2007 10:41 pm
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Exactly what TED said. I've never watched the memorials, and any companies that capitalized on it make me ill. Granted, it isn't something that we should forget any time soon, but I don't need to see it replayed over and over until I want to vomit.

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ToshoftheWuffingas
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Posted: Mon 08 Oct , 2007 1:15 pm
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A dignified response, TED. The reaction of New Yorkers to that day is a tribute to them.

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