Remembering

[magid]

I remember it being a regular morning, until an orker came in and asked me to check the news online, because the radio wasn't giving enough information. I'd done my usual morning check, and was surprised that this guy, usually focused on work all the time, was asking for my 'expertise' in getting information online. And then I found out what was going on, and couldn't believe it. And the news got worse, and no one could really work. Queue came in, concerned about his grandparents, newly moved to DC, and I tried to comfort him. I barely thought about the actual people I knew in NYC, not yet believing what had happened, really. It was a huge special effect, right? That can't happen here, right? And yet.

I remember going home, and there being no one around. I needed an outlet, and pushed myself onto the bicycle, going harder, faster, anything to make it not real. OPN happened on a non-Wednesday, and I stopped in, needing people, until there was some political discussion I couldn't bear to be by, and went home, still in shock of some sort.

I just dug out my paper journal, and read.

"Horrible news, in the US, not Israel this time: 2 hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center towers in NYC, as well as something happening at the Pentagon as well. People on the planes? People in the offices? No information yet. Arab terrorists? Someone else? Osama bin Laden? Who knows? Horrible, horrible. ... No phone lines available. All commercial flights in the US stopped. Web slow. And part of me just keeps wondering if this will bring it home to people just what Israel's been going through for the last year. What can you do against people willing to kill themselves as they take others out? ... One of the towers has collapsed - did everyone get out in time? Please let it be so. I hope after the attempted bombing they had a good emergency plan in place."

And I think of the plane in PA I didn't hear about until later. About how futile my hopes turned out to be, how thousands died, how the world changed, and mostly not in good ways. This country has become a place with politics I hate, trampling civil rights in a stampede towards the chimera of safety, which has, of course, been shown to be illusory. It has become a fragmented place, with the wrong man in the highest office, not an FDR trying to unite the country in times of stress, but trying to help only some to get more. It makes my blood boil.



And for the more recent disaster, remembering what I never saw through the photos in ZebraArtist's journal.

Comments

[zebraartist.livejournal.com]

powerful post
thank you

[magid.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of you today, especially.

[danger-chick.livejournal.com]

I was on my bike during the attacks, trying to get to school and clueless as to why the traffic was so bad. I was busy that day and had gone straight to work without thinking that the traffic was so bad at that hour because the towers downtown were being evacuated. And then later, around noon, I was told that the towers had fallen by a Chinese grad student who had just moved to America two weeks earlier.

And then later...I was biking home and out of my 12 years of biking in Boston it was the only day that I didn't think that 25% of the drivers would rather hit me than get home two seconds later. I remember thinking that everyone must have been in so much pain and shock that they couldn't handle one more trajedy and that even bicyclists deserved to get home that day unscathed.

[magid.livejournal.com]

It was such an odd day. I mean, there was tragedy, and then there were people's reactions, and the lack of non-military planes, and the utter shock, all around. I don't remember my drive home at all, just pounding through Arlington on the bike, trying to substitute for the hugs I hadn't yet found.