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Given its the 10th anniversary of one of the worst terrorist attacks in human history, please post where you were when you first heard the news of the attacks.

I was at school, in the middle of class.

I was asleep in bed when my father woke me up to tell me what had just happened.

I was in my first week of Sixth Form and events transpired while I was in Media Studies - I heard people on their mobile phones talking about a plane crashing into the Pentagon when I came out, then when I was going back home in a taxi cab I was hearing Tony Blair rant about terrorism concurrently to the Hindenberg-esque commentary about the World Trade Centre vanishing. Came home and saw the dramatic footage for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

9/11 was a key event that has seemingly dislocated everything in the Western world , with its effects still playing out - Blair on hindsight really went off the rails from that day, GWB was the wrong person at the wrong time, the post-WWII economy in North America and Western Europe started to really falter in 2001, perhaps never really recovering as we know it (Enron and Dotcom Crash, etc), and the conflict in Afghanistan is still grinding on and on and on.

Night_stalker wrote:Given its the 10th anniversary of one of the worst terrorist attacks in human history, please post where you were when you first heard the news of the attacks.

I was sitting at my desk at work, getting my day started, when a co-worker sort ran down the hallway saying an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I called my Other Half and asked him to turn on the TV to see what was happening. He got it one just in time to see plane number two crash into the second tower, and I heard him yelling about it over the phone. And that's when we knew it wasn't an accident.

I was 7 years old, and my mum and I were walking home from school and we stopped at the shops to get some stuff on the way. There was some chatter, someone had said there was a plane crash in America, so my mum rushed home to watch the news. We got in, the TV was switched on, and her jaw hit the ground and didn't come back up for several hours.
Looking back, it was the look on her face that scared me more than what I was seeing on the TV, it was the most shocked and horrified I've ever seen her.

I had just went back from school (~16h00-17h00, French hour) when the phone rang. It was my dad. "Turn up the TV" he said, his tone a little panicky. I'm was asking myself "Why ?", but as this seemed to be important, from the insisting tone of his voice, I complied, and turned up the TV.

While the cathodic tube was heating, and the screen still black, I was already able to hear some part of the new. I think I'll always remember the first words I heard, before seeing anything : "For those who are just joining us, the two towers of the World Trade center today have been...". I was confused, at first : In my city, we have an ensemble of three towers which dominate the skyline, residential towers, which people calls "the three towers". We also have a building called "the World Trade Center", in the business quarter. Then the cathodic tube went on and saw New-York. I was... relieved.

The two towers were still standing, a thick cloud of smoke going up from where they were hit by the planes, the records of the impact of the second one being played in some sort of hypnotic, horrifying loop. It was the same thing on almost every channels - there was no way out, it was as if the world was standing still, suspended to the outcome of this situation.

I remember the images of those debris falling, which weren't debris. I remember the detached, professional, almost clinical commentaries explaining that those debris weren't debris, but people - desperate peoples. And they kept falling, one after another.

I remember, not even ten minutes after I began to watch the television, with one of my sisters, the first tower collapsed. It was... unbelievable. Hypnotic. The ultimate train-wreck. The scenes of panic, people fleeing the ash-cloud, the constant "Oh my god, oh my god"... Viewed from the sky, it was strangely beautiful, the swirls of the ash cloud reminding me of the pyroclastic flows from a volcano. You could almost forget peoples were dying there...

I remember, one of the first thing my children mind thought about, seeing those images, was "There's a war coming. World War Three is coming". The second thought I had was for my grandfather, who had died less than two weeks before. I was thinking that, maybe, it was a good thing he wasn't here to see this.


I remember being eleven years old and seeing the world irrevocably change before my eyes.

Same as Night_stalker: I was in Spanish class, when somebody came in with a note for Señor Pabon. He stared at it for a few seconds, then said, "Somebody flew a plane into the World Trade Center."

I was in 7th grade. I was in biology when we heard that a plane had hit the world trade center. At first the assumption was that it was a small plane and that it had been an accident.

10th grade, first period homeroom, there was an announcement and the TV got turned on.

Also on that day for the sake of perspective:

Children who starved to death that day:41,000
Children who died from Malaria that day:2,880
People who died from AIDS: ~6200
Children who died from diarrhea: 9,863
People who suffered under the bonds of slavery: 20,000,000

I remember something that I couldn't easily articulate at the time, but which is part of what divides history into "before" and "after" around that day.

I remember a time when disasters simply weren't broadcast live - heck, when Nixon went to the Soviet Union or China it was a BIG DEAL that they had a live television feed of his arrival, they kept blinking "LIVE FROM CHINA!" (or "LIVE FROM MOSCOW!" or whatever) on the bottom of the screen. It was almost as amazing as when we had live pictures from the moon! You read about disasters, in the newspapers, days or even weeks after they occurred. As often as not the pictures accompanying the newspaper or magazine accounts were sketches or artists' renditions because people just didn't carry cameras around like they do today, and movie/video cameras were huge, bulky and uncommon.

(One notable exception was the assassination of President Kennedy which was broadcast live and captured on tape. But that's the only one that comes to mind.)

Of course, as the years rolled on we got more timely information on disasters, and gradually more live pictures. But 9/11 was the first time I recall such an overwhelming image overload. We didn't just see it live, we saw it live from a thousand different simultaneous viewpoints. That was new. Also new was the proliferation of phones, phones are so much more common these days than they used to be, cellphones in particular. How many tapes do we have of desperate people on the phone to emergency services, begging for rescue, only to hear a rumble in the background, maybe a scream or exclamation, then utter silence when the buildings fell? No longer do we have to imagine what people saw, what they were thinking as they saw their death coming, we know.

Yes, we'd had some of that before... CNN made its initial mark in raw footage from disasters and catastrophes, and there had been the occasional phone call from an explorer atop Everest calling his wife to say goodbye even as he froze to death, but 9/11 is when the technology really came together. The whole world (or as near as makes no difference) was watching, hearing this happen LIVE, as it happened, and filming each other watching the TV as it happened. You got detail from individuals covered in dust in a street looking up, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, to satellite pictures of the smoke streaming off Manhattan island. It looked entirely too much like a Hollywood disaster movie, except you knew the people literally running for their lives in the streets weren't extras, and the people choosing jumping over burning to death weren't special effects.

We've seen more of that sort of thing since - the Boxing Day Tsunami, for example, and the Japanese earthquake/tsunami of earlier this year, when my spouse woke me up out of sound sleep to see images of people in Japan trying to outrun the ocean. Even a place as desperately poor and deprived as Haiti still had enough cameras to capture the earthquake there as it happened, even if not to the same extent. Likewise, there's a hell of a lot more footage out there of actual bomb attacks, such as what happened in Madrid at the train station, than there would have been a generation earlier.

September 11, 2001 was the day the way people at large experience disasters went from "Have you heard about...?" to "Watch this, it's happening right now."

I think it's a significant change in the way the world experiences things. Potentially, it could be more traumatizing than the old way of learning the news. Is it good or bad, long term? I don't know. Certainly it makes analyzing what happened a hell of a lot easier than it used to be, our factual knowledge is much better, but I'm not sure of the emotional effects.

Alyrium Denryle wrote:Also on that day for the sake of perspective:

Children who starved to death that day:41,000
Children who died from Malaria that day:2,880
People who died from AIDS: ~6200
Children who died from diarrhea: 9,863
People who suffered under the bonds of slavery: 20,000,000

Well, yes, people die all the time, often horribly. But there's a difference between what, for lack of a better term, is the "normal background" death rate and someone taking a delibrate action to abruptly end the lives of thousands.

The thing is, there ARE people out there trying to save the starving, the sick, and free the enslaved. It doesn't always work, and even where we have technology for the job there are often logistical obstacles to getting it where it's needed. However, there aren't people going around deliberately injecting other humans with malaria. Not too many deliberately inducing fatal diarrhea, either. Yes, human action or inaction can lead to otherwise avoidable deaths, but most what you're talking about isn't a result of homicidal malice.

On the other hand, on 9/11, 19 men boarded airplanes, deliberately cut the throats of people to take over those airplanes, terrorized the remaining people on board, then deliberately crashed into three buildings with the intent to not only kill thousands, very directly, but apparently hoping to do so in a frightening and painful manner as well. That's different level of malice that what you mention, most of which might described as lethal levels of neglect (which are bad enough). The attacks on 9/11 were done to kill, to maim, and to burn into memory that day forever for those who were there, and those who watched.

And really, that's a major difference between even man-made disasters (such a man-caused drought or famine) and terrorist attacks. Outside of warfare, no one engineers a drought to cause the deaths of thousands. A screw up that causes mass causalities is horrific, of course, but it's not the same a deliberate murder. Accidentally running over someone with your car is a terrible thing, but it's not as bad as deliberately running someone down. A building collapse that kills people is horrible, but one that occurs through poor construction or maintenance is not the same as setting off a bomb in a building full of people with the intent to kill them.

I was driving down to Uni when I heard something about it on the radio. I didn't learn more until I'd gotten out of my first classes for the day, and was able to get to a quiet engineering lab to try to get some information from the almighty Internets . . . which had all gone down hard on account of everybody else trying to do the same thing.

I was an undergraduate TA at the time, and I did end up teaching my C++ lab that afternoon. I believe mine was one of the last courses (if not the last . . . the campus was eerily deserted when I was walking to the shuttle) taught that day, before the school administration cancelled classes for the rest of the day. Not one student in that computer lab was really into his or her work, that afternoon.

I do remember a couple of things very clearly. One was just how clear the sky was, with all the air traffic in the country being grounded. The other was flipping through the radio stations and coming across the local hip-hop station, where some caller was already complaining about how event coverage was crowding out his music, and the DJ tearing a strip out of his hide for it.

Alyrium Denryle wrote:10th grade, first period homeroom, there was an announcement and the TV got turned on.

Also on that day for the sake of perspective:

Children who starved to death that day:41,000
Children who died from Malaria that day:2,880
People who died from AIDS: ~6200
Children who died from diarrhea: 9,863
People who suffered under the bonds of slavery: 20,000,000

Oh go fuck yourself you self-important smug little twat. Take that bullshit elsewhere.

Well, yes, people die all the time, often horribly. But there's a difference between what, for lack of a better term, is the "normal background" death rate and someone taking a delibrate action to abruptly end the lives of thousands.

The problem is that our overreaction to the 9/11 attacks has been worse than the event that precipitated it. This constant "never forget" ritual bullshit around 9/11 not only de-values the lives of everyone who has died since (from both background deaths, and our wars which so far have claimed the square of the original 9/11 deaths), but continually rip the scab off the wound, causing us to think about and re-live the horror of that day. It is like captain Ahab looking down at his wooden leg every day while reading the names of his dead friends, or asking a rape victim to remember what she was doing five minutes before her attack, every year, for ten years. It is the opposite of the psychological healing we should be doing by now, and all it is going to accomplish is ensure that we will act like captain Ahab, sacrificing the lives of untold and unmourned millions in our quest for revenge.

I can't say for certain exactly where I was when it happened, because the first I heard about it was when I came home from school to find my mother in front of the television looking utterly shellshocked. By that stage it was all over. I remember thinking at the time that it had to be down to a handful of lunatics, and that it was a bit strange how they managed to positively identify Afghanistan and Bin Laden as the guilty parties within what, a few weeks? Never quite bought into the conspiracy stuff even at the tender age of fifteen, though, even if I did (and still do) see some uncomfortable parallels to the Reichstag fire when we did yet another module on the Second World War in school the following year.

I was at College (as in, age of 17, straight after secondary school), waiting for my bus home when I was told "they've bombed the world trade centre".

This didn't really mean anything to me as I had only the fuzziest idea of what the World Trade Centre was, but when I got home and saw the footage I was suitably impressed.

I first heard of it leaving school in year 5. Coming across the car park, I saw Mum walkng towards me and she said "Terrible news...." I thought for a moment she was goig to say that Dad had got massively delayed at the office or something.

When she said something abotut he twin towers I hadn't got a clue what she was on about, but I could tell it was not something to ask about so I kept quiet until we got home, turned on BBC News and sat there watching for four hours solid.

I was woken up by my clock radio to NPR. The lack of musical cues and the reporter's somber tone immediately clued me in that something serious was going down. She ran down the sequence of events that had occurred over the last few hours from the start: one plane hit one tower; another hit the other; one collapsed; then the other. I had this sinking feeling knowing that the world was about to go to shit.

Then I went into work. Everyone was there, but just...quiet.

I remember that day well, I was working in the Influenza room at the time. I first heard of WTC was on a discussion forum and my first thought was that it had to be an accident like the Empire State collision many years ago. Even after the second plane hit I thought it was accidental, small planes in bad weather with faulty air traffic controll or something like that. The Web was staggering along only barely and actual immages was impossible to view so it wasn't until I got home and switched on the TV that I got to actually see what had happened. By then the Pentagon had been hit and there were reports of bombs in the tunnels from Manhattan and Pearl Harbour was mentioned more and more frequently.

Fourth grade; all day, people had been being pulled out of school by their parents to come home and everyone was wondering what was going on. When I got home, my mom was waiting at the bus stop to tell me I wasn't going to Hebrew School that day. Then, she told me why.

I was waking up to go to school, when my grandmother came to tell me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I went downstairs to wake up my mother and tell her, and I remember jerking awake in surprise after I told her. The second plane hit while I was in the shower, and that's when I new for sure it wasn't an accident.

I had actually already decided to skip school that day. After my mother dropped me off, I walked downtown to this small mall. In the middle of the mall, just past the escalators, there was a large screen television that would always play mall advertisements. This day, they instead had it switched to CNN. I'll always remember that for the next few hours, that television permanently had at least two dozen people watching it. People would come and go, but that crowd always had at least two dozen people. We were all just kind of shocked.

Alyrium Denryle wrote:The problem is that our overreaction to the 9/11 attacks has been worse than the event that precipitated it. This constant "never forget" ritual bullshit around 9/11 not only de-values the lives of everyone who has died since (from both background deaths, and our wars which so far have claimed the square of the original 9/11 deaths), but continually rip the scab off the wound, causing us to think about and re-live the horror of that day.

You are absolutely correct about the over-reaction. That is why I have largely turned off the news these past few days. Yes, I mark the date. Yes, I have some thoughts about it. No, I do not want to see a loop of that horror play continuously for days on end. It serves no constructive purpose and life goes on. I have too many real, immediate concerns to dwell excessively on what happened ten years ago. If only the rest of the country could come to the same conclusion, but I guess they find masturbating with coarse sandpaper and spiky objects too appealing to stop.

I remember walking through the halls of my junior high between classes, hearing my fellow students talk about "Afghanistan" for some reason. My younger brother ran up and breathlessly told me the World Trade Center had been bombed. I didn't get it, it bounced right off of me. I told him something stupid about band. He looked at me in disbelief and repeated what he said. I still didn't get it.

History class that day was watching cable TV. I must frankly confess that it still felt like yet another story of "bad things happening to people far away." It didn't directly touch anyone close to me. I was 14 at the time. I still didn't get it. I knew the world was going to change, and I knew I was watching live history, but the emotional dimension was totally lost on me.

I've faced the deaths of loved ones since then, so maybe if it happened now, I would get it. But I don't know.

And every once in a while, I'm glad that I didn't get it, because apparently the effect that event had on lots of people was to pump up their bigotry and jingoism. But I realize that that's just sad.

I was at work listening to Howard Stern's morning show, (which ended up having the best coverage that day) when someone called in saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. At first I thought it was an accident, because things like that have happened before, then the second plane hit, and I said "Fuck, this is no accident, we're going to war."

I was working as a mechanic. I remember someone saying that the world trade center was on fire, and saying "Again? Wasn't that thing on fire a few months ago?" We all stopped work for a few minutes to go to the break room and just kinda check it out. The sound was off, of course, and I was all "man, that's a pretty bad fire!" We had no idea what was going on


Then we saw the second plane hit. It was pretty terrifying. then we turned the sound up, of course, and heard about flight 93 and the pentagon and we were like, genuinely scared (and we were in Tennessee!) we kept asking "What's next? is this all? Is it going to keep going?"

Bad scene, man.