heyzeus wrote:I can't watch footage from that day. I never want to see the planes hitting those towers again. It's too painful.
Four years ago, I actually taught a class on the social and cultural impact on 9/11--partly to force myself to learn a little more. I completely agree--the footage is horrifying.
Even then, I went at it indirectly--I started Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds--to talk about how others were thinking about and responding to the events.
Last edited by sighyoung on September 11 08, 8:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
heyzeus wrote:I can't watch footage from that day. I never want to see the planes hitting those towers again. It's too painful.
Me either. Or the footage from inside the towers that Benx mentions. I watched that the first time it aired.....and I can't watch it again. Makes me too sad......I do send my good friend in NYC an email every year on this day, just to let her know I remember and I'm thinking about her. She told me that she can just now start taking long showers without fear and recently stopped sleeping fully dressed (in preparation of another attack and having to flee the city).
That's awful. I'd have to move to some nice countryside town rather than live in fear.
It's hard to believe it was seven years ago already. You hear about it and see references to it so often that it is continually on your mind, and so it seems like it was so recent...
heyzeus wrote:I can't watch footage from that day. I never want to see the planes hitting those towers again. It's too painful.
Me either. Or the footage from inside the towers that Benx mentions. I watched that the first time it aired.....and I can't watch it again. Makes me too sad......I do send my good friend in NYC an email every year on this day, just to let her know I remember and I'm thinking about her. She told me that she can just now start taking long showers without fear and recently stopped sleeping fully dressed (in preparation of another attack and having to flee the city).
There is a tendency to think of only the dead sometimes, but it's easy to forget that some will be affected by this for the rest of their lives.
heyzeus wrote:I can't watch footage from that day. I never want to see the planes hitting those towers again. It's too painful.
Me either. Or the footage from inside the towers that Benx mentions. I watched that the first time it aired.....and I can't watch it again. Makes me too sad......I do send my good friend in NYC an email every year on this day, just to let her know I remember and I'm thinking about her. She told me that she can just now start taking long showers without fear and recently stopped sleeping fully dressed (in preparation of another attack and having to flee the city).
There is a tendency to think of only the dead sometimes, but it's easy to forget that some will be affected by this for the rest of their lives.
heyzeus wrote:I can't watch footage from that day. I never want to see the planes hitting those towers again. It's too painful.
Me either. Or the footage from inside the towers that Benx mentions. I watched that the first time it aired.....and I can't watch it again. Makes me too sad......I do send my good friend in NYC an email every year on this day, just to let her know I remember and I'm thinking about her. She told me that she can just now start taking long showers without fear and recently stopped sleeping fully dressed (in preparation of another attack and having to flee the city).
There is a tendency to think of only the dead sometimes, but it's easy to forget that some will be affected by this for the rest of their lives.
Great point.
My then-girlfriend had moved to lower manhattan (alphabet city) in 2000. We broke up in a very nasty manner in early '01. I hadn't talked to her in months. On September 11th, she was about 20 blocks from the towers, and could see them out her window. If I had to pick one word for the effects that day had on her, it would be "traumatizing." I can't imagine watching that happen to the city you live in, knowing friends whose parents worked in those buildings, being covered in the fine dust of those collapsed buildings as you go out on the street. Absolutely, let's not forget the survivors either.
I remember all of my classes pretty much stopped, as one of my school's history teachers came over the intercom and told us what happened. We listened to the radio for the rest of the day and watched the TV in the room(s) that had one.
I certainly don't want to trivialize what happened that day, but I always found it a bitter coincidence that three of the most notorious acts of my lifetime--the OKC bombing, Columbine, and 9/11--all happened when my school had scheduled half days.
At the time I was working in supply chain for a large medical product maker. About an hour after it happened, we were called into our war room where they gave us a listing of solutions, burn treatment, IV's, just plain enormous quantities of medical supplies that we had to locate all over the world to ship to NY in anticipation of tons of survivors.
We had clearance that day to make one flight from Puerto Rico to New York, I think they said it was one of four commercial flights that had authorization after the order to halt them had went out.
One of the saddest realizations of my life came when it was time to send all that product back where it came from.... there just weren't that many survivors who needed that kind of medical attention, either people made it out, or they didn't, not too many in the middle ground.
On a side note I had graduate school that night that wasn't called off in the tallest building in the Chi subburbs, it was really creepy at the time and everyone was looking out the window. I had to drive by Ohare on my usual commute and it was so strange not seeing any aircraft.
I had forgotten about that, about not hearing or seeing any planes for what a few days? I remember at the time how eerie it was that there were no planes overhead. I was putting my son on his school bus when it happened. In some ways it seems so long ago, but for so many people it is something they live with everyday and to them it always just happened. Sad.