A Moment Of Reflection For 9/11
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in The WorldUsually we have a moment of silence to commemorate national tragedies.
However, I propose something a bit different for the blogosphere. Personally, I think people should talk about what they felt right after 9/11 and in the years after that.
Share your stories, your emotions and your conclusions. We need to heal and getting these thoughts out in the open should definitely help us all.
But please remember, be respectful. That’s all I ask in Donklephant’s first “open thread.”
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 and is filed under The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 11th, 2005 at 4:35 am
I remember that day, waking up in Las Vegas and turned on CNN with their coverage of the first plane and then watching as the second plane hit the second tower.
Then it sank in that it was a terrorist attack, then the fears of what was next as the Pentagon was hit and then the story of the plane that went down in PA.
It was then, that I realized that even the US cannot be protected from terrorist attacks anymore. The oceans had protected the US from wars of an earlier age. This war on terrorism was even going to stretch over those same oceans.
Feel as one with the entire country was something surreal in those days and weeks following 9/11.
As we look back on that day that was on this day that is, we must honor those we lost as well as those injured and STILL recovering and we carry on as a country.
While we may be Democrats, Republicans or American Centrists we are all share the pain and the memory of 9/11.
Shaun
September 11th, 2005 at 6:11 am
Well put Shaun…
Myself, I was driving into work late and I turned on NPR. I heard that the first plane struck, and then, as I pulled into the office parking lot, they said that a second plane had hit. Immediately, I knew something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Upon entering the office, I found that most of the employees of Muller + Company were huddled in the conference room watching the big screen television. Peter Jennings’ voice talked over the images of the smoldering buildings and tried to explain the situation, but nothing could even attempt to explain this.
Confused and bewildered, we all sat around the television until the towers fell. Most gasped as they tumblied. I simply sat in shock as if this was all some sort of movie being played in real time. It literally didn’t seem real to me. Numb, numb, numb….
More time passed and we kept watching the tube. I had a deadline that day so I eventually walked away from the conference room and began working. The deadline was gone, of course, but I had to get away from those images. In retrospect, I still wonder how I got anything accomplished, but I felt I had to keep pushing forward for some reason. Even though I was horrified, I knew I didn’t want to keep watching the coverage.
In the following weeks, months and years I watched my country come together and break apart along ideological fault lines. It was quite an experience, and one I hope we never repeat.
And today I think of all of those who lost their lives that day. The people on the planes, the people in the World Trade Centers, the people in the Pentagon…I still can’t help but think of where I was when I learned America was under attack and the helplessness I felt.
I will never forget.
September 11th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
The phone rang and woke me Tuesday around 10 a.m., and when I picked it up my ex-wife said, “better get to work; they just blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” She would be at work, in her little crafts shop, with NPR on the radio, and she probably called me just for the macabre pleasure of being the first to inform someone. She knows I work the night shift and generally sleep past noon.
So I sat down in my bathrobe at the computer, thinking that she’d gone off the deep end, and I logged on to news sites (Reuters, AP) and I was looking at pictures that took a long, long time to register in my head. The first tower had collapsed. There was that ugly mushroom cloud blooming into the same blue morning sky that was out my window in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The text was updating as fast as I could hit the “refresh screen” button, and within minutes of my logging on, both towers were reported down. And I kept looking at the pictures, and the words, and thinking, “That can’t be right. That can’t be right.” I was there, just three weeks ago. As if that made it impossible. I had stopped watching TV years ago. Just then, I would have given anything to have one.
When I finally went in to start my newsroom shift, at 3 p.m., I kept one eye on the front of the room and the TV that is perpetually tuned to CNN or ABC News, and there I saw what everyone else had already been seeing for hours. I’ve spent years defending print media against people who live by video, but this was one story the moving pictures had to tell.
I was given two full inside pages to fill with wire news. Then two more. There were hundreds of stories, each one saying the same thing in slightly different words.
But there was the art. I had to figure out if the picture of the man falling headlong from the North Tower was going to fit my page layout better than the picture of the woman sobbing on the curb, covered in blood. I had to figure if “carnage” or “horror” fit better in a 54-point headline. I looked through stacks of victims’ photos that came in, waiting to see a picture of someone I know — another one. There was already one, a hockey scout from Boston I had gotten to know years ago.
In scrolling back through the AP stories I came across the first wire notice of the calamity, a bulletin datelined “New York” and slugged “Trade Center-Crash,” bearing the time stamp 0856EDT. It was a single sentence: “Smoke poured out of a gaping hole in the upper floors of the World Trade Center on Tuesday and there were broadcast reports a plane had struck it.”
I thought of some anonymous ink-stained AP wretch in the New York bureau, filling the quiet early shift on an election day till he saw the punctured tower from his window, flipping channels madly or listening to Howard Stern like everyone else in the city, wondering “what the hell was that?” And the second plane is screaming down the Hudson Valley at 500 mph, but he or she doesn’t know that yet.
After the single sentence, as in all such AP bulletin stories that move in takes, is the single word “MORE.”
For almost 20 years now I’ve been a print journalist. That day, for the first time, I didn’t want to go to work. The ceiling seemed low, just above my head. Sound came muted. At some time the newsdesk phone rang and I picked up the receiver. A woman’s voice: “Is this all they’re going to show on TV today? It’s so depressing!” I don’t remember what I told her. She wanted to find a hole in the sand to bury her head and not look at the horror. Like a lot of Americans, her TV was the only place she knew to find one. But TV was where it happened.
I went home after deadline and tried to sleep. I lay down, dozed for an hour, but these images had been in my head all day and they wouldn’t stop seething there. Two days later, my handwriting changed. I wrote a check, and the letters came out jerky and sharp. It didn’t look like my hand at all.
Everyone saved the paper from the morning of Sept. 12, with the heart-attack headlines in 120-point Olympian. But I took home one dated Sept. 11, the issue we had put together the night before, with utterly trivial news all up and down page one, school board meetings and farm shows, and I stuck it in the bottom of a drawer to find 40 years from now.