Remembering
Sep. 11th, 2005 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidI 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.
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.