Attack on the U.S. 9/11/01
Sep. 13th, 2001 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperIt is two days after the fact and my country is still reeling.
I have had a lot of thoughts roiling through my head in the last 48 hours, but only just now have I been able to get them together to be posted here on my web page.
People have been talking about events so traumatic that they will remember until their own dying days what they were doing at the time. For me, I have burned into my heart a surreal juxtaposition of a positively wonderful dinner and conversation the night of the 10th -- and the events of the morning of the 11th. The night before, I was happily chatting away about my favorite actor, my favorite bands, and music in general with three friends. We finally all went to bed around 2:30am Pacific time on the 11th, as I had to get up early to take one of said friends to the airport so that she could fly back East.
Around 6:30am Pacific time we got up; by 7am, we were at the bank and getting cash from the ATM, so that I could loan Mary some money. She'd lost her own ATM card the day before. I wound up getting the strap of my fannypack caught in my car door and couldn't figure out how to get it back out again, and finally opted to just drive with the bag dangling out of my door all the way to the airport because I didn't want Mary to miss her flight.
We listened to music all the way there -- so we had no idea what was happening until we reached the airport and found a huge backup of cars. In this backup the first of nearly a dozen people got out of his car to come tell me my bag was caught in the door -- I assured him I knew and thanked him. At first I thought the cause of the backup was an accident, but saw no sign of one as we finally reached the cop who was directing all the traffic away from the main thoroughfare leading into the airport proper. She looked extremely harried, but she also told me my bag was caught in the door. I thanked her too.
Some of the cars went on around the cop, so I was hoping we could make it back up to the terminal and figure out what was going on. Poor Mary was beginning to get extremely nervous, as she had told me that she doesn't travel well anyway. We managed to make it up to the terminal...
Only to be told by another cop that a "terrorist" (something -- a word I could not make out then and cannot remember now for the life of me) "in New York" had taken place and that he needed us to go down to the baggage claim area. Deeply concerned, we did so, and I looked for a place to park the car while assuring Mary that if we couldn't get her on a flight, we'd get her on a train. Or put her up at my home as long as was necessary.
We parked, and tried to enter the terminal, only to find a woman waiting with baggage for a friend to come and pick her up. She told us more about what had happened and that they weren't letting anyone at all into the airport. So we turned around and left, even more worried now.
On the way out at least six or seven more cars honked at us to tell us the bag was caught in the door. Mary rolled down her window to keep telling people we knew and that the door was jammed, while we turned on the news and heard the first details about the planes that had crashed.
Mary got deeply anxious to call her family back East, so we drove over into Southcenter Mall and looked for a pay phone so she could do that. We didn't listen much to the news -- it was too troubling. We looked at one another and murmured plaintively that we wanted the Russell-Crowe-related dreams we'd both had as we'd slept, the inevitable result of a lengthy conversation about that particular gentleman. Those dreams were much nicer than the one into which we'd awakened, a nightmare in which planes could fall from the sky and kill thousands of people.
While Mary called her family and assured them she was all right I finally got my purse free of the door, and we headed back to my house. There we found my partner Dar and my friend and tenant Cyn glued to the television and learned that all the planes that had gone down were in fact commercial airliners. Mary went upstairs to collapse, while I went to work and asked Dar and Cyn to contact me if I was needed.
Work wasn't exactly productive.
I spent pretty much the entire day glued to the Web. My message boards of choice, the ones for my favorite bands, overflowed with messages from all over the country as well as all over the world -- messages from people begging friends on the East coast to check in and let everyone know they were all right. Messages came in from Canada and Denmark and Italy and South America and Britain, from posters who were horrified and moved by what had happened and who showed their love and support for and solidarity with their American friends. Online friends of mine in Sweden and Norway contacted me personally to do the same.
I became very conscious of the sense of all of these people with whom I shared common affection for two particular bands banding together, not as citizens of any particular country, but as people. Even the lead singer of one of the bands in question surfaced on their message board, encouraging everyone to keep posting about the crisis and expressing his support. That man has now crossed the line for me from idol figure to real, living, breathing person. It was a small gesture but one which made me want to cry.
I cried, too, when I heard about the people jumping in desperation from the windows of the upper floors of the World Trade Center. And I cried when I learned about the heroic passengers on Flight 93 who took back their plane from the hijackers -- and who may well have saved countless more innocent lives on the ground by redirecting their doomed craft to crash in an empty field rather than into another national landmark.
A local friend said on a mailing list on which my partner participates, of Thomas Burnett on Flight 93: "I hope he likes mead."
Those people, I am convinced, have won themselves a place in Valhalla. I hope that Congress awards the entire lot of them posthumous Medals of Honor.
The night of the 11th, I got home just in time to hear President Bush address the nation. I have not been a supporter of Mr. Bush; I didn't vote for him, and I was disgusted by the circus made of the election that eventually got around to putting him into office. But in this time of crisis I hope that he will continue to demonstrate to the world that he has what it takes to lead the most powerful nation in the world.
I do not normally consider myself particularly patriotic. But I am moved to the depths of my heart about how my country has rallied together for the heroic rescue efforts going on in New York -- and how all over the nation people have flocked to give blood and to donate their money to the relief efforts. Hearing about how people all over the nation have been moved to bring out their American flags to show their pride in their country has brought tears to my eyes.
I do not normally consider myself very religious. I do not know what name or shape the Divine holds for me, but I have been very conscious of a need for divinity. I find myself winging prayers to the Divine for the families of all of those whose lives have been lost.
I do not normally consider myself very conscious of the world past my country's borders. But in the last few days I have been deeply, deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support from Canada, whose citizens have been positively stellar to us, their neighbors to the south. From Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Italy and Britain and South America, where citizens are weeping and praying for my country and leaving flowers at our embassies. From all the other countries in the world, even those not normally not allies of the U.S., who have spoken out in condemnation of the brutality which has been committed against our citizens.
At the same time I have striven to keep conscious of those whose viewpoints do not match my own. There are those, even here in the United States, who believe that we deserved what we got. There are those who have asked why this particular atrocity is any more horrific than the other atrocities which happen daily all over the globe. There are those who remind that the U.S. does not exactly have a spotless history when it comes to dealing with other nations.
I can understand and sympathize with those who call for the U.S. to clean up its act abroad.
But I cannot sympathize in the slightest with those who have taken it upon themselves to attack innocent Muslim residents of our country. We should punish the guilty -- not the innocent.
And I cannot sympathize in the slightest with the religious extremists in our own country who have seized an opportunity to advance their own personal, highly divisive agendas in a time when a war has been declared on our country and thousands of people have died at the hands of terrorists from abroad.
This is a time when our nation needs to come together as one people, regardless of our individual ideologies, political positions, ethnic backgrounds, religions, genders, or anything else.
We need to stand in support of one another, and not go for one another's throats. We need to stand strong in the face of this assault upon us -- and prove to those who would fill us with terror that they cannot, should not, WILL NOT WIN.
-- finished at 8:21pm
I have had a lot of thoughts roiling through my head in the last 48 hours, but only just now have I been able to get them together to be posted here on my web page.
People have been talking about events so traumatic that they will remember until their own dying days what they were doing at the time. For me, I have burned into my heart a surreal juxtaposition of a positively wonderful dinner and conversation the night of the 10th -- and the events of the morning of the 11th. The night before, I was happily chatting away about my favorite actor, my favorite bands, and music in general with three friends. We finally all went to bed around 2:30am Pacific time on the 11th, as I had to get up early to take one of said friends to the airport so that she could fly back East.
Around 6:30am Pacific time we got up; by 7am, we were at the bank and getting cash from the ATM, so that I could loan Mary some money. She'd lost her own ATM card the day before. I wound up getting the strap of my fannypack caught in my car door and couldn't figure out how to get it back out again, and finally opted to just drive with the bag dangling out of my door all the way to the airport because I didn't want Mary to miss her flight.
We listened to music all the way there -- so we had no idea what was happening until we reached the airport and found a huge backup of cars. In this backup the first of nearly a dozen people got out of his car to come tell me my bag was caught in the door -- I assured him I knew and thanked him. At first I thought the cause of the backup was an accident, but saw no sign of one as we finally reached the cop who was directing all the traffic away from the main thoroughfare leading into the airport proper. She looked extremely harried, but she also told me my bag was caught in the door. I thanked her too.
Some of the cars went on around the cop, so I was hoping we could make it back up to the terminal and figure out what was going on. Poor Mary was beginning to get extremely nervous, as she had told me that she doesn't travel well anyway. We managed to make it up to the terminal...
Only to be told by another cop that a "terrorist" (something -- a word I could not make out then and cannot remember now for the life of me) "in New York" had taken place and that he needed us to go down to the baggage claim area. Deeply concerned, we did so, and I looked for a place to park the car while assuring Mary that if we couldn't get her on a flight, we'd get her on a train. Or put her up at my home as long as was necessary.
We parked, and tried to enter the terminal, only to find a woman waiting with baggage for a friend to come and pick her up. She told us more about what had happened and that they weren't letting anyone at all into the airport. So we turned around and left, even more worried now.
On the way out at least six or seven more cars honked at us to tell us the bag was caught in the door. Mary rolled down her window to keep telling people we knew and that the door was jammed, while we turned on the news and heard the first details about the planes that had crashed.
Mary got deeply anxious to call her family back East, so we drove over into Southcenter Mall and looked for a pay phone so she could do that. We didn't listen much to the news -- it was too troubling. We looked at one another and murmured plaintively that we wanted the Russell-Crowe-related dreams we'd both had as we'd slept, the inevitable result of a lengthy conversation about that particular gentleman. Those dreams were much nicer than the one into which we'd awakened, a nightmare in which planes could fall from the sky and kill thousands of people.
While Mary called her family and assured them she was all right I finally got my purse free of the door, and we headed back to my house. There we found my partner Dar and my friend and tenant Cyn glued to the television and learned that all the planes that had gone down were in fact commercial airliners. Mary went upstairs to collapse, while I went to work and asked Dar and Cyn to contact me if I was needed.
Work wasn't exactly productive.
I spent pretty much the entire day glued to the Web. My message boards of choice, the ones for my favorite bands, overflowed with messages from all over the country as well as all over the world -- messages from people begging friends on the East coast to check in and let everyone know they were all right. Messages came in from Canada and Denmark and Italy and South America and Britain, from posters who were horrified and moved by what had happened and who showed their love and support for and solidarity with their American friends. Online friends of mine in Sweden and Norway contacted me personally to do the same.
I became very conscious of the sense of all of these people with whom I shared common affection for two particular bands banding together, not as citizens of any particular country, but as people. Even the lead singer of one of the bands in question surfaced on their message board, encouraging everyone to keep posting about the crisis and expressing his support. That man has now crossed the line for me from idol figure to real, living, breathing person. It was a small gesture but one which made me want to cry.
I cried, too, when I heard about the people jumping in desperation from the windows of the upper floors of the World Trade Center. And I cried when I learned about the heroic passengers on Flight 93 who took back their plane from the hijackers -- and who may well have saved countless more innocent lives on the ground by redirecting their doomed craft to crash in an empty field rather than into another national landmark.
A local friend said on a mailing list on which my partner participates, of Thomas Burnett on Flight 93: "I hope he likes mead."
Those people, I am convinced, have won themselves a place in Valhalla. I hope that Congress awards the entire lot of them posthumous Medals of Honor.
The night of the 11th, I got home just in time to hear President Bush address the nation. I have not been a supporter of Mr. Bush; I didn't vote for him, and I was disgusted by the circus made of the election that eventually got around to putting him into office. But in this time of crisis I hope that he will continue to demonstrate to the world that he has what it takes to lead the most powerful nation in the world.
I do not normally consider myself particularly patriotic. But I am moved to the depths of my heart about how my country has rallied together for the heroic rescue efforts going on in New York -- and how all over the nation people have flocked to give blood and to donate their money to the relief efforts. Hearing about how people all over the nation have been moved to bring out their American flags to show their pride in their country has brought tears to my eyes.
I do not normally consider myself very religious. I do not know what name or shape the Divine holds for me, but I have been very conscious of a need for divinity. I find myself winging prayers to the Divine for the families of all of those whose lives have been lost.
I do not normally consider myself very conscious of the world past my country's borders. But in the last few days I have been deeply, deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support from Canada, whose citizens have been positively stellar to us, their neighbors to the south. From Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Italy and Britain and South America, where citizens are weeping and praying for my country and leaving flowers at our embassies. From all the other countries in the world, even those not normally not allies of the U.S., who have spoken out in condemnation of the brutality which has been committed against our citizens.
At the same time I have striven to keep conscious of those whose viewpoints do not match my own. There are those, even here in the United States, who believe that we deserved what we got. There are those who have asked why this particular atrocity is any more horrific than the other atrocities which happen daily all over the globe. There are those who remind that the U.S. does not exactly have a spotless history when it comes to dealing with other nations.
I can understand and sympathize with those who call for the U.S. to clean up its act abroad.
But I cannot sympathize in the slightest with those who have taken it upon themselves to attack innocent Muslim residents of our country. We should punish the guilty -- not the innocent.
And I cannot sympathize in the slightest with the religious extremists in our own country who have seized an opportunity to advance their own personal, highly divisive agendas in a time when a war has been declared on our country and thousands of people have died at the hands of terrorists from abroad.
This is a time when our nation needs to come together as one people, regardless of our individual ideologies, political positions, ethnic backgrounds, religions, genders, or anything else.
We need to stand in support of one another, and not go for one another's throats. We need to stand strong in the face of this assault upon us -- and prove to those who would fill us with terror that they cannot, should not, WILL NOT WIN.
-- finished at 8:21pm