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I sit besides the window and think . . .

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TORN
Post subject: I sit besides the window and think . . .
Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 5:53 am
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. . . of all that happened down below. I'm sitting in my room on the 19th floor of the Millenium Hilton hotel with an unobstructed view of the site of the World Trade Center in NYC, still familiarizing myself with board77, writing an incoherent swan song at TORC, watching ROTK-SE on my little travel DVD player, and just thinking about the events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath (rather than preparing for my speech tomorrow morning -- I guess I'll just suck out loud, but I think I'm only speaking to about two dozen or so people, so who'll know, really??).

I have always, and will always, refuse to call the site of the World Trade Center "Ground Zero". I find "Ground Zero" to be simply a term of war and destruction, language that grows out of and is used to support a military view of what happened then and has happened since, language that caught on with the public because of our society's (at least US society's) need for simple pithy phrases to describe indescribably complicated events, language that (oddly) seems too inpersonal and sanitized as an abstraction that obscures the personal and collective tragedy that is so much better described, in my view, by referring to what I see below me as "the site of the World Trade Center."

Calling it the site of the World Trade Center, for me, really brings to my mind the true suffering of this place. It was a vast complex teeming with life, from the subway station and underground shopping terrace to the pair of 100 story towers of offices -- a place I had gone to so often in a prior professional capacity to close dozens of transactions in one of the grand conference rooms at the top that overlooked the river and the Statue of Liberty, to make speeches in the old Vista Hotel (later the Marriott) that was always so much rattier than the World Trade Center deserved -- a place where I once contemplated working, a place where a firm that my organization regulates was almost entirely wiped off the face of this earth -- well, really, it was its hundreds of men and women who made the firm what it was who perished -- a place I was scheduled to be at the following week -- a place whose attack I listened to on the radio as I inched my way forward in traffic one bright crisp morning in September, only to find that the vast Pentagon that I had just driven within clear sight of less than 10 minutes earlier was now emitting a pillar of smoke when I arrived at my office and looked back out the window, only to find myself acting the role of a desparate parent as I tried to find someone near home to immediately pull my children out of the largest Jewish school in the country for fear of what might be unfolding in Washington, only to find myself driving the long way around the Beltway back home as the short route by now had been blocked off for the emergency response at the Pentagon, only to be searching that bright crisp morning sky all the way home while listening to radio reports of an unidentified airplane thought to be headed toward Washington, only to be reunited with my children at the playground in front of our house, looking up to a sky emptied of all flying machines.

The men and women who died at the site of the World Trade Center deserve more than the pithy phrase that so neatly ties that tragedy to the gross military adventurism that followed. To be clear, I fully supported the military action in Afghanistan (in fact, I think we dithered too much before launching that). It's what followed that I find so grossly offensive, punctuated by the recent call-up of one of the people at my organization from military reserve to head over to Iraq -- a man for whom we had to put together a collection so we could buy him some body armor that he would not otherwise receive, so we can help him come back home to his lovely wife and two children. I believe, without any real evidence, that Lyndon Johnson carried with him the burden of his decisions regarding the Vietnam War, and that burden helped carry him to an early death. I fear those currently responsible for our irresponsible military adventurism lack the conscience to recognize that there is such a burden to borne.


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Impenitent
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 11:32 am
Try to stay perky
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TORN, as a person who has never visited the US and lives far away - the other side of the world, in fact, the events of that day still have a surreal feel to them.

We were up late - we often are - and witnessed it unfolding on the news bulletings; that first plane that surely, SURELY, was a terrible accident, mechanical error or the pilot stricken with illness - and then seeing the second plane and realising that the unbelievable, unimaginable had happened; trying to call an old and loved friend from home now living in New York knowing she worked in that precinct.

She has visited several times since then to see family and friends and we talk about it every time. She's a New Yorker now and she talks about how things have changed. That the change is palpable, irreversible, she says. I don't doubt it; I feel the repercussions here and they have altered everything. It's a whole new world - smaller and scarier.

I share your concerns about the political gods who seem to see no grey in their decision, confident that God is with them. I have never understood how anyone can ever claim that God is partisan when it comes to human lives.

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Lidless
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 12:25 pm
Als u het leven te ernstig neemt, mist u de betekenis.
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This body armor thing gets me really pissed. I cannot believe that poorly equipped soldiers are being sent out there.

Of course, this is the way of the world and the same thing flows through history the same way one might piss in a stream.

But really! In this day and age, I realize troops have more equipment than ever was - but for the world's greatest economy to be unable to supply body armor for its troops just smacks of an uncaring attitude that does not have its priorities right.

I was going to attack Bush's policies here, but I'll save that for another thread.

Regarding the WTC, I was actually on the 17th floor of the WTC in Amsterdam when it happened. Pretty nervous times, I can assure you. No one knew whether it was an attack on WTCs per se. I've never seen so much window gazing as then.

To make matters worse, I was due to have lunch on the Window On The West on the 18th. There but for the grace of whatever go I...

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Marty
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 12:27 pm
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Wow, that must have been chilling, Lidless. Was there a mad rush for the exits in Amsterdam?


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Lidless
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 1:57 pm
Als u het leven te ernstig neemt, mist u de betekenis.
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No, but there was certainly fear and dread in the air, especially since Schiphol Airport, the fifth(?) busiest hub in Europe, was less than 10 miles away. We could all feel our hearts pumping.

My company has a trust fund and banking operation in Amsterdam, and the traders in the banking department have live feeds and screens to just about every relevant news source you can think of, so they saw it on CNN (3pm local time). Within one minute everyone knew and piled into the trading room to watch and hopefully understand what happened.

We had one trader who thinks he's an expert in everything.

"It must be an accident."
Two minutes later the second plane hit.

"Those are built to withstand airplane crashes. Look at the size of them."
Two minutes later they started to collapse.

"Well, the government offices will be safe and protected by the military."
Two minutes later reports come in that the Pentagon has been hit.

"I'm sure it's only going to happen in Ameri-"
"SHUT UP"

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truehobbit
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 6:45 pm
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I guess this got posted because it's March 11th?

So, as we are doing some remembering:

A year ago today terrorists killed almost 200 people in Madrid by planting bombs in commuter trains.

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The Watcher
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 7:10 pm
Same as it ever was
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TheLidlessEyes wrote:
No, but there was certainly fear and dread in the air, especially since Schiphol Airport, the fifth(?) busiest hub in Europe, was less than 10 miles away. We could all feel our hearts pumping.

My company has a trust fund and banking operation in Amsterdam, and the traders in the banking department have live feeds and screens to just about every relevant news source you can think of, so they saw it on CNN (3pm local time). Within one minute everyone knew and piled into the trading room to watch and hopefully understand what happened.

We had one trader who thinks he's an expert in everything.

"It must be an accident."
Two minutes later the second plane hit.

"Those are built to withstand airplane crashes. Look at the size of them."
Two minutes later they started to collapse.

"Well, the government offices will be safe and protected by the military."
Two minutes later reports come in that the Pentagon has been hit.

"I'm sure it's only going to happen in Ameri-"
"SHUT UP"
That will be the only day that I can literally recall nearly every event as it happened. I was stuck in a mad dash in the middle of rush hour traffic to my mandatory systems training class, (we were smack in the midst of a big merger, and needed to learn what types of computer systems we would be working on.) I was listening to my favorite local morning news show, when the first tower collision was announced, and there was no way of anyone knowing what had occured then, they thought it was a small commuter plane out of control. Then, the second. That one happened right on the news feeds. I was literally dumbfounded, and I was the one who announced it to all when I finally got to the training class. It was not until we got a break that we could even follow up with the rest of the events, including the collapsing of both of the towers, and the knowledge that the Pentagon had also been struck and that another plane was missing. The training leader would not dismiss us. At lunch break, we learned the true horrors, and things were shutting down. By 2:00 p.m., our normally bustling city was a ghost town. There were huge fears of Chicago being struck, with the Sears Towers where my brother worked, only an hour away, and everyone was just sent home.

Then there was the shock that there were people out there who truly hated us, and did not care how their objectives would get achieved. For those of you in Europe, maybe that was not so shocking, but it was for us here in the states. We were collectively numb and dumbfounded. Those things just did not happen here, or when they did, it was our own local whackos who had done it.

An awful day, and the events in Spain a year ago I am sure were planned with that particular date significance in mind.

Remembrance.
:(

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Dave_LF
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 7:38 pm
You are hearing me talk
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I was stuck in an office in Greenfield, Indiana. When someone ran in and told us to check the news I tried, but excite, CNN, MSNBC, etc. were all clogged. Took quite a while to piece events together. I still freak out a little whenever a couple news sites go under at the same time.


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TORN
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Posted: Fri 11 Mar , 2005 8:08 pm
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truehobbit wrote:
I guess this got posted because it's March 11th?

So, as we are doing some remembering:

A year ago today terrorists killed almost 200 people in Madrid by planting bombs in commuter trains.
Actually, it was simply a sad coincidence that I happened to be in a hotel overlooking the site of the World Trade Center on this first anniversary of the train attacks in Spain -- another shocking and deeply saddening event worthy of rememberance.


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Marty
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Posted: Sat 12 Mar , 2005 5:02 am
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truehobbit wrote:
A year ago today terrorists killed almost 200 people in Madrid by planting bombs in commuter trains.
I have family not too far from there. I rode that subway. In some ways that one affected me as much as 9-11.

Last edited by Marty on Sat 12 Mar , 2005 5:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

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TheEllipticalDisillusion
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Posted: Sat 12 Mar , 2005 5:45 am
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Ah 9-11...how vividly you are burned into my memory. I was away at school when it all went down (no pun intended). My friend came down the hall and said: the WTC has been hit by planes. I said: shut the fuck up, because a) I thought he was just being a dick b) I say that to a lot of my friends-- we're mean to each other, it's fun. Then I watched the tv...and down to the Earth went the towers. I wasn't sure it was even real.

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