Like many of you, I’ve been thinking today about the terrorist attacks eight years ago. My husband and I were living in London. I had watched the uneventful 1 pm news while eating lunch. Around 2 pm, which would have been 9 am in New York, someone called and told me to turn the tv back on. I was glued to the BBC for the rest of the day and night.
I remember watching the people trapped on the roof of the World Trade Center and wondering why none of the helicopters could get close enough to rescue them. I remember watching the south tower and later the north tower collapse. I simply could not believe a plane was able to crash into the Pentagon.
I remember the tremendous grief for the victims of the attacks, including 67 UK citizens. 9/11 claimed the lives of more British people than any single terrorist act by the Irish Republican Army. My not-easily-riled husband still gets irritated when people refer to the 3,000 “Americans” killed on 9/11.
In the weeks after the attack, I lost count of how many British people told me how very sorry they were about what had happened. Some of those people were strangers who approached me after hearing my American accent in a shop or a train station. They felt compelled to speak to me. The outpouring of support for the U.S. was real.
I didn’t lose any friends on 9/11. I only had one acquaintance who lost a loved one that day (his father was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center). Still, I felt incredibly angry about the attacks. I read many of the newspaper profiles of victims. During the Jewish high holidays in late September 2001, the last thing I felt like doing was reflecting on the past and forgiving wrongs from the past year. I remember listening to a BBC radio segment taped by the UK’s Chief Rabbi, David Sacks. He reminded listeners that the Bible (I assume he meant the Hebrew Scriptures or “Old Testament”) tells us once to love our neighbors, but tells us approximately 30 times to love the stranger. That’s because it is easier to love our neighbor, who is probably a lot like ourselves, than it is to love a stranger. It was an important message during a time of grief and sorrow.
Please share your own memories of 9/11, or anything else on your mind, in this thread.
UPDATE: If you haven’t seen it yet, read the diary Billy Parish cross-posted here yesterday, containing his memories of 9/11 and a call to action on global warming.
The UK Sunday paper The Observer published these statistics from 9/11 and the aftermath during the summer of 2002.
3 Comments
In August 2001, I had just bought 40 acres....
outside a teeney tiny little town called “Jarisco” in extreme Southern Colorado, right on the New Mexico border.
I had an ancient but very well kept up adobe shack, a well, some very old outbuildings, quite a bit of pasture for my two horses, and a view of the Rio Grande gorge. In the evenings, the local herd of wild mustangs would form a dust cloud as they ran down to get a drink.
No electricity or running water, but it was pretty damned close to heaven. Jarisco had a tiny artist collective, and I was just setting up an artist blacksmith/foundry shop to be supplemented from shoeing horses on the ranches all around.
I was finishing up my seasonal work as a ranch hand at the L Cross Ranch on Sept. 11th. My task was to keep a herd of four thousand cattle on the leased range and out of the Rio Grande National Forest. Beautiful country not a paved, or even gravel, road within miles just back country stock trails dating back to the Spanish Land Grant.
I was astride a horse when my boss, the ranch owner came tearing up the trail on a four wheeler to breathlessly tell me what had occured that morning.
By October, when Shrub signed the USA Patriot Act into law, I knew it was time to sell out and leave this gorgeous life I had built to engage in resistance to this new evil that prowled the land.
The rest is history, dozens of arrests for speaking out against the excesses of the Bush administration, being subpoenaed before a Federal Grand Jury for “Acts of Terrorism”, being labeled a “Credible Threat to National Security” in a DoD “Talon” intelligence report, and months spent languishing in a prison cell for daring to challenge the Bush-Cheney agenda of building smaller “tactical nuclear weapons”.
Did 9/11 change my life? Well, hell yes it did. But at least I met Sally and Havah, the two loves of my life.
eltondavis Fri 11 Sep 4:13 PM
Like most people
I obviously remember 9/11 extremely well. When I heard the news, watching the towers fall, etc. But the biggest thing for me was the fact that my son was born about a month after the attacks. It was a very strange time to bring a new person into this world. When we were at the hospital, the news was all about the anthrax scare. It’s kind of odd to think that he has no idea about the pre-9/11 world.
rf Sat 12 Sep 9:32 PM
I have two friends
whose wives gave birth on 9/11. They felt surreal being in the hospital, trying to celebrate the birth of a healthy baby, when the whole country was in mourning. One of the babies was actually 9 pounds 11 ounces! He was born just a few hours before the attacks happened.
desmoinesdem Sun 13 Sep 1:43 PM