|
I have a bit of a unique experience involving 9/11: I didn't experience it. My high school was a small private school which had a mandatory Monday-Friday backpacking trip through the wilderness. There was no civilization or central camp site, we camped where we stopped for the night until we met where the bus was waiting for us on Friday. As luck would have it, the trip was scheduled the week that 9/11 happened. Apparently the teachers found out with a radio (I don't know the details or if it was two-way) but they withheld that information from the students. Nobody learned about it until we got on the bus on Friday. I've heard plenty of "where were you on 9/11" stories, which usually involve where they were when they learned about it, but what I want to know is what was the post-attack hysteria like? What were the first few days of the country/world like after an event like that without any real information or explanation?
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 07:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 30, 2024 03:37 |
|
|
Apparently I was on a plane heading home from somewhere where it happened, but I don't remember that event or anything surrounding the days after 9/11. I didn't know and I didn't care (Mostly because I was like 4 or 5?). I say this because I think it's an interesting contrast to put people whose lives were not directly affected and who did not care so much right next to people who remember every detail at the moment and worried about their families in New York City since a lot of people seem to imply it's that "one great event" that everyone remembers and was important for everyone.
AdorableStar fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 08:27
|
|
|
AdorableStar posted:Apparently I was on a plane heading home from somewhere where it happened, but I don't remember that event or anything surrounding the days after 9/11. I didn't know and I didn't care (Mostly because I was like 4 or 5?). I say this because I think it's an interesting contrast to put people whose lives were not directly affected and who did not care so much right next to people who remember every detail at the moment and worried about their families in New York City since a lot of people seem to imply it's that "one great event" that everyone remembers and was important for everyone. Up until fairly recently, anybody not old enough to vividly remember 9/11 wasn't old enough to say anything of much value in public dialogue. For the decade-plus that had gone on since the attacks, that was exactly the case. Nobody 4-5 in 2001 was going to be saying anything about 9/11 that wasn't clouded with childhood naivety or over generalized teenage political opinions. Almost all of the significant writing about the event took place during that time.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 09:26
|
|
|
During the attacks Big Brother (the TV-show) was going on here in Denmark. The producers didn't tell the people in the house about the attacks, and I seem to remember there being some controversy about that fact. I do remember the producers saying that when people were voted off, they would take them into a room alone and tell them about the attacks. And they specifically said there would not be cameras present during that time. How did you feel about the facts being withheld from you? edit: I took the bus on the morning of the 12th, and the entire ride was eerily silent; normally people were chatting and stuff, but not this morning. On the Friday following the attack, there was two minute's silence all over Europe I think, and all the cars in the road stopped for those two minutes. brylcreem fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 09:32
|
|
|
brylcreem posted:During the attacks Big Brother (the TV-show) was going on here in Denmark. To be honest, I was pissed then for selfish reasons (I was bored as poo poo the whole trip and wanted ANYTHING to think about while hiking), and I'm kind of pissed now, but having done jobs managing high school students at a quazi-camp, I certainly understand now that the result of revealing that could be unpredictable. The reason I'm pissed now is that my dad was scheduled to be in one of the towers for a meeting in NYC on Tuesday, on a floor that a plane directly hit. The meeting was rescheduled last minute to be an hour later, and my dad heading to the Brooklyn Bridge when it happened. Everyone he was going to meet with died. I don't recall being aware of that at the time, and I doubt the teachers were, but the fact stands that for all sakes and purposes my dad should have died that day.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 09:38
|
|
|
I'm from the UK and was 13 when the attacks happened. My mum told me about it coming out of school and I went straight home to watch the news on the TV. I distinctly remember thinking this was pretty big at the time, but kind of considered it like a natural disaster in another country. Something horrible, but a bit too far away to really affect us. The response in my school was definitely pretty muted - the July 7th London bombings 4 years certainly had much more of an impact on us at the actual time of the bombing.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 09:48
|
|
|
I'm American, I was 19 years old and I was in the Army at the time stationed in Germany. I was doing maintenance on equipment when we heard about it on the radio. From what the radio said it sounded like the first plane was a Cessna and an accident so nobody really cared. About half an hour after the second plane hit the motor pool sergeant got a phone call telling us all we had 30 mins to be in front of our respective company headquarters with bags packed for a month of field operations. I'd guess that's how long it took for the Army to decide to raise the security posture on it's bases and for that to filter down to us. My platoon ended up being the designated quick reaction force for the base and we spent the next month or so living in the upstairs part of the military police station. The only times we were allowed to go anywhere or do anything was going to the dining facility next door to eat (in shifts, in case something happened we'd have half the platoon ready) and once a week we were allowed to go home and take a shower, in shifts again. Of course, literally nothing happened during that month but I did get a lot of reading done. For a few days there were armored vehicles and infantry doing patrols around the base and tanks at both gates, although I don't know if they were actually given live ammunition. Eventually things de-escalated and we only did guard stuff like that for maybe one week out of every two months.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 10:09
|
|
|
http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ Offsite archive of the Something Awful thread as the attacks happened. It's been a few years since I read it, but what struck me most was the sheer sense of panic. The major news sites crumpled under the traffic, there were unconfirmed reports all over the place, nobody knew a drat thing, especially when the third plane hit the Pentagon. Edit: Transcripts of 9-11 calls and cockpit transmissions: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Flight_93_Transcript_with_CARTC There were full transcripts of the Flight 93 calls, but thanks to the loving plague of conspiracy sites I can't find them. There's a transcript of Tom Burnett's calls to his wife that looks like it ends right before they tried to storm the cockpit: http://www.tomburnettfoundation.org/transcript.html Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 12:05
|
|
|
Why do you now care 14 years later? It was seen as a big deal, lots of coverage. I was young enough that I didn't differentiate it from any other world news disaster to be honest. I saw it happening on the news and went home and didn't think or care about it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 13:26
|
|
|
i was at a kind of hick school at the time and while we all knew something was going on nobody really knew what and the first reports were kinda garbled, so everyone decided the Russians had launched a cruise missile strike and taken out the White House as well as the Pentagon and WTC and we were all gonna get Red Dawned until a couple hours later I figure most of the crazy truther theories out there had their genesis in some game-of-telephone elaboration of that first brief stretch of news stations just saying poo poo because they didn't really have a complete story yet but had to report something A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 14:27
|
|
|
http://www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive There. I thought I was dreaming when my roommate told me a plane had crashed into the tower, then got up in time to see the second hit. For me the worst part wasn't seeing the plane hit, it was when the buildings collapsed and you could hear the screams rising in the street (and maybe from inside, I don't know). It reminded me of Titanic survivors describing the mass screaming from the people left in the water to die. That and the people jumping. I then spent about four hours having panic attacks because I knew my dad was flying on the east coast that morning and he was a pilot for American. Then spent the next week mostly staying inside the house because as a Muslim woman wearing the veil at the time I got some seriously unpleasant verbal poo poo when I left it on the 11th and 12th. Tendai fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 14:29
|
|
|
I was in my senior year of high school. My dad worked for the US Army as a civilian...and he was scheduled to be on a flight to the UK to meet with contractors (he did acquisition/procurement stuff), leaving from Newark, on 9/11. Fortunately, that flight didn't even take off. Left some of his folks stranded in the UK for a few days, but everybody was OK and got home once US airspace reopened and flights resumed. Some of the folks he knew and worked with were at the Pentagon, but fortunately everybody he knew got out OK to my recollection. He worked at Fort Monmouth, a now-closed base...and I remember being scared when in a car that was by the gates. For the first time *ever*, there were armed MPs on gate duty, HMMWV's nearby, and road barriers up, for a while afterwards. Before 9/11 you actually could use Fort Monmouth as a kind of shortcut, it was a pretty open base. After 9/11, no way. The MPs and HMMWVs were a pretty constant thing for at least the next few months. As for me? I was spending half of my day at my "home" high school, and half of my day at an alternative HS for kids with emotional/psych issues. I was getting in the van to take me from one school to the other at about the time the second plane hit the WTC towers. Fortunately, we were near the bus office...So me and the driver said "Screw it, we can be late" and headed there to watch it on a TV. I would eventually get to my other school (the alt one), and be worried as hell all morning, really up until lunch, when a social worker beelined for me. I remember that moment vividly, because I thought my dad was dead for just an instant. Then, of course, she spoke, telling me that my dad had called and said he'd been at the airport when they shut down the airspace, and not to worry. I'm told I didn't show that much emotion until later, once I'd gotten home. (Naturally, mom and dad were both home.) My brother was in Brooklyn at the time, studying at Pratt Institute, and I remember his call that night, saying how there were troops outside the hospitals. How he could see the smoke from the site across the river. I don't recall if he came home (I don't think he did), but it was...rough.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 15:11
|
|
|
I was attending high school on Long Island at the time. There were some people at the school who's parents worked at the WTC that were on their phones or just freaking out in general around the hallways. I specifically remember the slow ramp up of information. I know early on in the day, in between science periods people were jokingly talking about some idiot accidentally crashing their plane into the towers. Each class period the news got worse and more accurate, until finally my French teacher was telling us about how the towers were gone now and many people were dead. That was probably not the best thing to be telling us, given our proximity to the city. Also, we didn't close early or cancel classes that week, since people's parents were stuck in NYC with no easy way to get out, so no one could come pick up their kids.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 15:27
|
|
|
I had joined the Air Force a little less than a year before 9/11. I was in the last weeks of my job training when it happened. My job training was in the alternate base command center building so it wasn't unusual for that building to be in a higher threat level than the rest of the base. They pulled all the people from the 3 calibrations classes in a room and told us that "Planes had hit the world trade center and that until further notice it was business as usual." The way they made it sound it was tiny Cessnas and not loving passenger planes. They bussed us to lunch which was cool because we didn't have to march a mile to get to chow, none of the TVs in the chow hall were on and the mood was really weird. We finished out the day of classes and marched back to the dorms, this is where poo poo got weird. They assigned 2 door guards who had to check everyones bags before they were allowed in the dorms. The line to get inside the actual building stretched back a quarter mile, finally after about 30 minutes of waiting I got inside. I changed for PT and started to go outside when my MTI looked at me and told me PT was cancelled (for which I was very happy!) I put on Civilian close and again tried to leave to go the local cyber cafe to play Everquest when I was told that we were locked down to the student area (The Triangle). I was pretty pissed (still not knowing the full extent of what happened), I went back to my room to watch some TV. This was also the first time I was able to turn on my cellphone as well. I turned on my TV to see the full horror of what had happened as well as getting like 30 voicemails with people wanting to know if we were ok at Biloxi (why people thought terrorists would attack Biloxi is beyond me). That was when I realized "Holy gently caress we are at war! I'm glad that pussy Al Gore didn't win and we have a strong leader like Bush in office!" The rest of the day was very solemn for me, I just watched the video over and over again. In my training class we had 3 guys from Saudi Arabia, the rednecks in their apartment complex spent the night kicking on their door and shouting death threats at them. I'll never forget "Chiefs" face when he said "We didn't have anything to do with this, why are they threatening us? We are allies!" There was a guy in my training class that to this day maintains that the 3 Saudis had something to with 9/11 since they asked him "How far is Washington DC from New York?" because there trip home took them through New York and they were going to be in New York for a few weeks before returning to Saudi Arabia. 9/11 fundamentally changed my life. My entire Military career was changed by 9/11. As someone said bases used to be these open and free little areas that you could drive onto, check out and leave. Now they are locked down to prevent poo poo from happening. A few weeks after 9/11 some Marines tried to get back on base with no IDs. The military police turned them around, they walked about an 1/8th of a mile down the fence, climbed the fence and took off running. The MPs chased after them, eventually arresting them in front of my squadron as we were in formation. It was pretty funny. It took about a 3 weeks for us to be let off base after 9/11 occurred. My first stop was the cyber cafe to play Everquest, it was weird to see people talking about 9/11 inside of EQ. I was also banging my girlfriend the day that we went to war in Afghanistan and they locked the base down again. I had signed out that day but since cell phones weren't prevalent back in 2001 they didn't have a way to get in touch with me. I returned to base only to see the base was on lockdown AGAIN after the war started, thankfully this lockdown was short. The 2 base lockdowns played havoc on the local Biloxi economy, the cybercafe I went to that was open 24/7 changed their hours during the lockdown because they weren't able to drive non-military traffic there. So many businesses right outside of the base went out of business because they lost 95% of their customer base for roughly a month. I'm sure it was like that everywhere that had training bases. Well this post was wayyy longer than it should've been, but these are my memories of 9/11. If you want more detailed answers just let me know and I will expand upon whatever you want to know.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 16:48
|
|
|
SalTheBard posted:In my training class we had 3 guys from Saudi Arabia, the rednecks in their apartment complex spent the night kicking on their door and shouting death threats at them. I'll never forget "Chiefs" face when he said "We didn't have anything to do with this, why are they threatening us? We are allies!" There was a guy in my training class that to this day maintains that the 3 Saudis had something to with 9/11 since they asked him "How far is Washington DC from New York?" because there trip home took them through New York and they were going to be in New York for a few weeks before returning to Saudi Arabia. I converted to Islam in the 10th grade. After graduation in May 2001, I moved out of a rural Alaskan fishing town and down to the San Luis Obispo area in California to go to school. Coming from Alaska, California had always been touted as a super-liberal, mellow place. That's more or less what I found in my first few weeks of living there and going to school. Then 9/11 happened. It's important to note that I was still wearing the veil at that point, not the full-on burqa but just the standard urban Muslim hijab. In other words, I was visibly Muslim. The day after it happened, September 12th, was horrible. I'd had to go to the store the previous day but decided not to after finally hearing from my dad that it wasn't his flight, so I went on the 12th. I don't really know how to describe the hostility, it's like nothing I'd ever felt directed at me before and I haven't since, that I can think of. I'm a dwarf, so I'm fairly used to teasing, or stupidity, or just plain cruelty. I can mostly ignore it at this point and could back then too, after 18 years of dealing with it. But this was different. Staring is normal for me. That kind of... baleful, hostile staring is not. I can't think of a time in my life when I've been so totally unnerved by the behavior of people around me when they weren't overtly doing anything to me. At one point, I remember hearing a woman whisper to her husband (I assume) that "she should be ashamed!" as I walked by them. It wasn't violent, but it was shocking in a pretty hard way to me. Luckily my roommates were cool people and there was none of that at home, but for about a week as I remember it, after 9/11, I could not go places with other people without getting some kind of poo poo if I paused long enough to pay attention to my surroundings. Tendai fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 17:07
|
|
|
For you Americans out there, how prevalent were opinions like this:Kramer on 9/11 posted:Not to belittle the signifigance of these events, but you do realize that this means a whole slew of "anti terrorist" and probably "anti violence" laws will be passed through congress. compared to this: IRQ on 9/11 posted:somebody will motherfucking pay I've heard from a bunch of people that America basically went crazy for a bit after 9/11, but how did that actually manifest to you? It's an alien concept to me since even after the 7/7 attacks in the UK (obviously much smaller scale) there was not a real sense of hysteria at any point, and i'm curious about stories like the military being on lockdown and Tendai having to basically stay indoors for a week.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 17:10
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:I've heard from a bunch of people that America basically went crazy for a bit after 9/11, but how did that actually manifest to you? It's an alien concept to me since even after the 7/7 attacks in the UK (obviously much smaller scale) there was not a real sense of hysteria at any point, and i'm curious about stories like the military being on lockdown and Tendai having to basically stay indoors for a week. As for reactions, a lot of it probably depended on where you live. I imagine it was probably scary as poo poo to be in DC or New York that day and maybe in the days after, probably the closest that anyone came to actual hysteria. The event provided something to latch onto for everyone with any kind of political agenda or belief. Hawks, doves, conspiracy theorists, everyone, so the reactions were almost anything you can think of. I was part of a couple Islamic forums at that point and there was a lot of fear on them, especially from people who lived or had lived in places with more severe government repression than the US has ever had so it seemed like not a far-fetched idea to them that anti-Muslim legislation of some kind could occur in the wake of an attack that horrific. Fear and anger. I remember being angry once I got over the shock. Aside from the loss of life in the attacks, aside from that horror, these loving people made life harder for just about every other Muslim on earth. Certainly somewhat more difficult for just about every visible Muslim in the US, even just in terms of things like "random" screenings at airports. I still get angry thinking about it too much. Seeing someone pervert your beliefs like that and do what they did is hard. Tendai fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 17:25
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:For you Americans out there, how prevalent were opinions like this: remember when noted controversy rear end in a top hat Bill Maher lost his TV show because he finally went too far in mentioning that maybe 'cowardly' wasn't an epithet that applied to guys who are willing to charge a planeload of people with a boxcutter and die for their beliefs yeah
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 17:26
|
|
|
like i heard plenty of both sentiments expressed in private, sometimes both from the same person, but for a year or so there you would definitely lose everything if you said one of them in public
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 17:28
|
|
|
Tendai posted:I can't think of a time in my life when I've been so totally unnerved by the behavior of people around me when they weren't overtly doing anything to me. At one point, I remember hearing a woman whisper to her husband (I assume) that "she should be ashamed!" as I walked by them. It wasn't violent, but it was shocking in a pretty hard way to me. Luckily my roommates were cool people and there was none of that at home, but for about a week as I remember it, after 9/11, I could not go places with other people without getting some kind of poo poo if I paused long enough to pay attention to my surroundings. It breaks my heart that this happened to you because on 9/12. Its terrible the bullshit that happened to Muslims (and to Sikhs) on the days following 9/11. MikeCrotch posted:For you Americans out there, how prevalent were opinions like this: Probably being in the Military opinions like this weren't popular, in fact the Patriot Act was viewed very favorably by most of my friends and associates. It wasn't until 2005 or so that I heard a military member speak against the Patriot Act and it blew my mind. My base Keesler AFB was convinced that we were the next terrorist targets because all the Air Force pilots were trained there. I think there was hysteria because people didn't know what was coming next. We didn't know if there were more attacks coming, if power plants were going to be next, if we were going to be dirty bombed or anthraxed. It was just a wild 2 weeks. SalTheBard fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 18:53
|
|
|
SalTheBard posted:It breaks my heart that this happened to you because on 9/12. Its terrible the bullshit that happened to Muslims (and to Sikhs) on the days following 9/11.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 20:22
|
|
|
I was in Junior High ceramics class in the middle of making a sculpture listening to NYC radio when it happened. Our teacher was cool (aren't all art teachers?) and kept the radio on so we'd have something to listen to if we were good while working. The lady was in the middle of describing what a clear and beautiful day it was when I heard her voice trail off, several seconds of stunned silence, then "Oh my God". Immediately all coverage went from a boring day to talking about what was happening live, pretty much. The irony is like a few minutes before that they were talking about what a beautiful view the clear sky would be from the Twin Towers that day, and what a beautiful day it would be to visit it.  The day scared the poo poo out of me because at the time, my dad worked at the New York Stock Exchange. We found out later that he was safely evacuated, apparently his building had some sort of underground tunnel network escape route specifically designed in case of that kind of disaster, and he was perfectly fine. He told me the whole area was covered in smoke and it was impossible to see. It was rough for people in the tri-state area in general. One kid from our school who I never met apparently lost a parent on that day.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 20:30
|
|
|
I was a freshman at college. I got out of class that morning and there was a crowd of people watching TVs in the hallways. This was strange in itself because those TVs weren't used for anything but showing powerpoint slides with school announcements - "this class is canceled" or "deadline to get student aid applications in is..." or whatever. They were showing CNN, which had never happened before and crowds were gathering around them. I got the gist of it and headed back to my dorm. I woke my roommate up and told him that a plane hit the WTC and he said "You're loving with me." so I turned on the TV in our room and we spent most of the day watching news on this tiny little TV that was sitting on an uneven stack of books. Classes got cancelled and there was a candle light vigil but I think in general no one really knew what to do or how to feel.MikeCrotch posted:For you Americans out there, how prevalent were opinions like this:
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 22:03
|
|
|
Jeza posted:Why do you now care 14 years later? I guess I never really thought about it. People talking about their experiences with 9/11 almost always revolve around when they learned about it, and not the immediate aftermath. By the time I was back in civilization, there were still many more questions than answers, but there was still a lot more information on what was going on as the media and government had to an extent gotten their bearings. 9/11 started for me on late 9/14. klosterdev fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Sep 30, 2015 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 22:29
|
|
|
I'm British. I remember working on a building site, listening to the radio when the first plane hit, and thinking "wow, that's awful". Horrific, but a fairly normal terrorist kind of thing. One disgruntled guy or something, maybe a couple. Then the second one hits, and I thought "gently caress me, this is going to cause a war that'll kill all of us". I still had a fair bit of nuclear fear due to a childhood of reading sci-fi. We called it a day on my site, and went home. Once the third plane hit the Pentagon, I was fairly sure none of us would make it to the end of the year due to retaliative strikes from either side. I was too freaked out to pay much attention to the fourth plane. This was, by now, clearly a well-organised group who hated America, and wanted to cause a lot of grief. I'm glad I was wrong about potential escalation, but then again, I live in a country where we've not been escalated against. As well as the poor people who got killed in the attack, I feel sorry for the people who live in the countries who now enjoy a perpetual war, thanks to the actions of some reprehensible cunts.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2015 22:36
|
|
|
I was at school when 9/11 happened. I came home and saw it on the TV. I forced myself to shed a tear by visualising an imaginary dog that might've died on the plane. I wanted to be seen as compassionate at this cataclysmic moment but I wasn't feeling much watching the footage. The next day my peers were making airplane noises and running into each other. I told them to be considerate and thankful that they weren't on those planes. One proto-truther idiot laughed and told me "Dad says jet fuel can't melt steel beams". Well I have no idea what his dad did for a living, but it can't have been physics or chemistry. Then he, his brother and their idiot pals started running round me in a circle making 'Neeeeerrrr'-like airplane noises with their arms flapping out, occasionally bumping into me until I started to cry. The same thing happened with 7/7 except with buses.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 00:06
|
|
|
I saw the attacks on the TV when I came home from school. As someone else said it being so far away it didn't really register beyond how a natural disaster around the world would. I have a more distinct memory of the invasion of Iraq. I remember the search for WMD's was a common conversation point at this time and discussing with my friends how America would invade even if they found nothing, which it was becoming increasingly more likely they wouldn't. Then one night watching BBC I saw the bombing of Baghdad which sounded the beginning of the invasion.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 00:29
|
|
|
I was a senior in high school. Driving to school, the attacks were announced on the radio. It was a stupid morning show, so it was really strange to hear the DJs being completely serious. There was a lot of confusion about what was going on. I walked to my first class and told the teacher. He grabbed a portable TV from his office and turned on CNN. We watched the second tower fall. I remember thinking it looked just like a movie, but knowing it was real. I was on the other coast, so there was a sense of distance from the events. Afterwards was hard. I remember wondering when everything would go back to normal--the late 90s were a glorious time of money and a general sense of invincibility. It seemed like every other day doing something, traveling especially, had new rules designed to make you "safer." Most people didn't care because they were genuinely scared. The sense of fear was pervasive and there really wasn't much push back until Obama was running for president. Even now, I think the intense fear-mongering in politics is a reflection of that post 9/11 environment.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 01:37
|
|
|
I was a college sophomore in New Jersey at the time. I had arranged my schedule that semester so I only had classes two days a week (unrelated note for college students: huge mistake, don't put all your classes in 2 days, you will fail) and I had that Tuesday off. I remember my roommate waking me up by turning the TV on after the first plane hit. We figured it was just a small private plane that made a huge mistake. We were watching when the second plane hit, and that's when everyone started going loving crazy. It ratcheted up another notch once we heard that the Pentagon was hit. Walking around campus, everyone was in a state of disbelief. Lots of random crying people who had family who worked in lower Manhattan or in the towers themselves. Communication was essentially impossible. This was in the era before every person had a cell phone (most people I knew at the time didn't and those that did only used them for emergencies) and a few years before smartphones even existed. Phone lines were tied up so the people in the city had no way of reaching out to their families or vice versa. A lot of local television stations and radio stations were offline because they had transmitters on the top of the towers. There was plenty of paranoia about what the next attack was going to be and who was responsible. The post-9/11 anthrax attacks a month or so later actually hit the post office near the campus, so that added even more fuel to the fire. There was a really out-of-place sense of community and fellowship for a few months afterwards, too. Northeasterners, especially in NYC and New Jersey, have a well-deserved reputation for being aloof and unfriendly to strangers. We had a similar thing in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy decimated huge portions of the Jersey Shore. I talked to my neighbors for the first time ever because of that!
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 01:42
|
|
|
Brennanite posted:Afterwards was hard. I remember wondering when everything would go back to normal--the late 90s were a glorious time of money and a general sense of invincibility.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 02:25
|
|
|
I was in a small college in Canada when it happened, and I can mostly remember three overall camps the day it happened. There were people angry, and the prevailing hate was directed towards Palestine for some reason. The average person was a little shook up, but nobody I noticed around the school was crying or anything; it was mostly an overall feeling of unease. On the other side there was an anti Bush sentiment growing assuming he was going to start a bunch of wars and get a bunch of "safety" laws passed. Not that he was ever popular with the college crowd here, but even on the day it happened a lot of people became more vocal against him.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 05:20
|
|
|
I remember a lot of confusion and weird theories in the first days after it happened. Didn't it take at least a few days before they attributed it to Al Qaeda?
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 06:22
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:I've heard from a bunch of people that America basically went crazy for a bit after 9/11, but how did that actually manifest to you? 9/11 was the final nail in the 90s, and it was hammered down so hard some people woke up like reverse Rip Van Winkles and desperately wanted a return to the mythical 50s. Craziest thing I remember is the lack of air traffic in Los Angeles. It's one of the few times hearing a helicopter made me pause and feel scared for a moment. But there was TONS of hatred seething from the masses in the weeks that followed. I couldn't listen to FM talk radio without someone saying we should glass all of the middle East or something. ashgromnies posted:Didn't it take at least a few days before they attributed it to Al Qaeda?
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 06:42
|
|
|
ashgromnies posted:I remember a lot of confusion and weird theories in the first days after it happened. Didn't it take at least a few days before they attributed it to Al Qaeda? I remember hearing on the radio that a number of different groups claimed responsability, including Palestinians, Iranians, Iraqis, Libyans, etc. The radio was my only real contact with the outside world and they didn't have a clue as to what was happening for a week or two. Almost nobody had heard of Al Qaeda at that point and a lot of people had a relatively positive image of the anti-Soviet mujahideen.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 07:58
|
|
|
I grew up in DC and was a politics student in the city at the time. I had evening class that day, so I was asleep for the initial reports and didn't hear about it until the early afternoon when my father came home and told me that planes had hit the WTC and Pentagon in a suicide attack, a car bomb had gone off at the State Department, and it was pretty chaotic. The "car bomb at the state department" turned out to just be a rumor. I remember that my father and I had lunch together (which hardly ever happened; we were not particularly close). I asked if anyone we knew had been killed at the Pentagon, and I tried to call an ex-girlfriend who lived in NYC to make sure she was OK. My father and I agreed that it was probably the Palestinians behind the attacks, we worried that there would be security checkpoints and whatnot and make DC's horrible traffic even worse, maybe there'd be poo poo at the airport. My memory of what my emotional state was like is a bit like the UK people are describing -- like it were some kind of freak disaster and I hoped that nobody I knew was killed. I didn't even really comprehend that there were people who were thinking more along the lines of "somebody will motherfucking pay" until I got online later that day and saw more of the general reaction.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 09:48
|
|
|
Strom Cuzewon posted:http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ Wow there are an awful lot of people in there who are ludicrously optimistic about how well America's reponse would go
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 10:18
|
|
|
klosterdev posted:I guess I never really thought about it. People talking about their experiences with 9/11 almost always revolve around when they learned about it, and not the immediate aftermath. By the time I was back in civilization, there were still many more questions than answers, but there was still a lot more information on what was going on as the media and government had to an extent gotten their bearings. You should check out some of the news coverage when the 2nd plane hit live on TV. It can kind of give you a picture of what things were like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMQWzdc175A blackguy32 fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Oct 1, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 11:14
|
|
|
Orcs and Ostriches posted:I was in a small college in Canada when it happened, and I can mostly remember three overall camps the day it happened. There were people angry, and the prevailing hate was directed towards Palestine for some reason. The average person was a little shook up, but nobody I noticed around the school was crying or anything; it was mostly an overall feeling of unease. On the other side there was an anti Bush sentiment growing assuming he was going to start a bunch of wars and get a bunch of "safety" laws passed. Not that he was ever popular with the college crowd here, but even on the day it happened a lot of people became more vocal against him. I remember the day - I believe the anti-Palestinian sentiment may be because one of the news stations showed Palestinian kids celebrating that it happened.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 13:56
|
|
|
Spacewolf posted:I remember the day - I believe the anti-Palestinian sentiment may be because one of the news stations showed Palestinian kids celebrating that it happened. I specifically remember the news, and not just Fox, claiming that the PLA had claimed responsibility for the attack, and when something like that gets out it sticks in peoples' heads, especially if it's pretty much what they wanted to hear anyway.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 14:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 30, 2024 03:37 |
|
|
Spacewolf posted:I remember the day - I believe the anti-Palestinian sentiment may be because one of the news stations showed Palestinian kids celebrating that it happened. EDIT: Yeah something like what Commubot said
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2015 14:42
|
|