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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!
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Oct 1, 2015 01:42
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:42 |
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