9/11/2001

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nycfan

nycfan

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Hard to believe how long ago it was now. It retains such immediacy for me …

Don’t recall seeing this photo before.

 
Honestly, I have a rather fraught relationship with 9-11.

It was an enormously traumatic event, and people my age have been instructed to "never forget it" for more than two decades, but we have never as a country grappled with the lessons we might have learned from it. It has been used to justify the basest and most shameful impulses, and encouraged the demons of our worst natures, far more frequently than it has led to anything akin to growth or understanding.

What's the point of holding on to trauma if we never try to heal?

Sometimes I wonder if it would not be better if we did, in fact, forget.
 
nycfan said:
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Had a deposition in New York City in November 2001. Spent some time afterwards at ground zero to get a sense of the destruction. I remember how acrid the air smelt then -- like after an electrical burnout. In retrospect, probably was not the greatest health risk to take -- of course, no one warned that the air could still be toxic. Can only imagine how bad the air quality was on September 12 for the rescue workers.
 
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StrangePackage said:
Honestly, I have a rather fraught relationship with 9-11.

It was an enormously traumatic event, and people my age have been instructed to "never forget it" for more than two decades, but we have never as a country grappled with the lessons we might have learned from it. It has been used to justify the basest and most shameful impulses, and encouraged the demons of our worst natures, far more frequently than it has led to anything akin to growth or understanding.

What's the point of holding on to trauma if we never try to heal?

Sometimes I wonder if it would not be better if we did, in fact, forget.
Click to expand...
Yep. We should never forget that using events like 9/11 for nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan is NEVER a good idea.
 
I was working in Pittsburgh on 9/11. Beyond all the stuff that was seared into everyone's memory that day, two things stand out for me.
1) How empty the sky was that day after the attack.
2) I was on the phone trying to convince the folks at EPA Region III that the meeting scheduled the next day in Philadelphia with my client was just not going to happen and we should switch to a conference call. They were insistent that the meeting had go forward because they had people coming in for it from Washington. They kept this up until, until they finally said, they had to evacuate their building and the meeting would be postponed indefinitely. As sat for a moment in my office thinking how stupid they were and what a waste of time that was, when my office manager came and said, "(05C40), there is a plane between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, headed towards Pittsburgh, and it's radios are off. You have to get out of the building NOW!" That was Flight 93. It wasn't coming for Pittsburgh.
 
Working on Capitol Hill that day. Started as a gloriously perfect fall morning and then. Prettty chaotic on Capitol Hill and all the tunnels, given the uncertainty of what exactly was happening.
 
We’ve all got our recollections of 9/11…I was teaching at East Carolina #OTD 23 years ago and was driving there, listening to the radio, when I heard. A few months before this date in 2001, WUNC had gone from a format weighted heavily toward classical music to one of all news and human interest via National Public Radio. It was a telling, almost prescient adjustment. As I drove toward Greenville from Chapel Hill I was listening to the standard fare and somewhere just before the traffic mess that was the approach to Wilson in those days I grew bored and in search of outrage switched over to loudmouth Don Imus. I was ‘there’ when the news hit.

At 1:42 of this YouTube the news comes in:







This very broadcast starkly highlights a before and During narrative as by telephone a friend of Imus’ recounts what he’s seeing from his bedroom window 7 blocks from the World Trade Towers. It is revelatory. To hear it again is chilling to the bone.

Of course I was stunned - then I dialed back to WUNC and the reporting. At a stoplight in Wilson a pick-up pulled beside me - we were both listening to the radio. I looked over at the baseball-capped, mustached driver. He looked back and gave me a huge shoulder shrug. The light turned green. I’m a Historian so as I drove I turned to trying to suss out the significance of September 11.

I study Latin America and while I’m not by any means a stickler for dates, I remembered that 9-11-73 marked the death of Salvador Allende, the president of Chile. He’d crossed the USA and Nixon and Kissinger by being a socialist in “our backyard” during the Cold War as well as insisting on market prices for copper (Deemed an essential at the time by the US Military Industrial Complex because of The Vietnam War). Despite his legitimate election in a nation with, at that time at least, a strong tradition of Constitutional Democratic Republicanism and fair elections, our CIA and State Department turned to overthrow Allende. On September 11, 1973 that effort succeeded and a pro-USA military dictatorship was installed and Allende died in was has been ‘ruled’ a suicide. Chile suffered at the hands of “our son of a bitch” (one of many generated by Cold War anti-communism) General Augusto Pinochet for the next 16 years.

So that shot through my mind but was quickly slid to the back as the news pointed more and more conclusively to the Middle East. Just the same I can’t say that I didn’t also reflect on 1995 and Timothy McVeigh’s terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City. He had proven to anyone that was open to the broadest range of thinking that we had citizens and citizen movements within the nation who were capable and sufficiently motivated to murder wantonly to bring down our own Republic in the name of their deranged rightist worldview. But it turned out, as we all know, that a different brand of conservative thinking lay behind 9/11, this one rooted in a zealous, fundamentalist misinterpretation of a different sacred text, ‘The Koran.’

So now we’ve come back around. April 19, 1995 to January 6, 2021. That’s 26 years. It’s 51 years since Chile, 1973. I realize we are all pondering a 23 year span of time today…I guess the historian in me has to stretch it out and seek both farther back, and afield, for antecedents and causation. Many more than the 3,000 innocents, in the towers, and engaged in rescue efforts, perished on September 11 and in the long, long aftermath…many, many.

I can’t help but think, given Chile 9/11/73, Oklahoma City 4/19/95, and Washington DC 1/6/21, that there’s a Big Picture we’re missing. I can’t put my finger on it, I can’t do more that try and piece together a larger understanding. I figure this essay — on this day of all days — will probably not be a popular one among the homages rightfully written and delivered for the dead, plenty of them so heroic in their demise. It won’t go noticed to be sure. I’ve always struggled with the larger story into which 9/11 lies though. Clearly I still am. Looking at where things stand today there is one thing I believe I can project. Were Timothy McVeigh and Osama Bin Laden alive today that the events of January 6, 2021 would have made them both smile Putinesquely.
 
StrangePackage said:
Honestly, I have a rather fraught relationship with 9-11.

It was an enormously traumatic event, and people my age have been instructed to "never forget it" for more than two decades, but we have never as a country grappled with the lessons we might have learned from it. It has been used to justify the basest and most shameful impulses, and encouraged the demons of our worst natures, far more frequently than it has led to anything akin to growth or understanding.

What's the point of holding on to trauma if we never try to heal?

Sometimes I wonder if it would not be better if we did, in fact, forget.
Click to expand...
On Facebook a meme was circulating saying the way to honor the 9/11 victims is to remember who we were on 9/12/01. My thoughts were we should remember who we were on 9/10/01.
 
HIjackers
American Airlines Flight 11
Mohamed Atta - Egypt, tactical leader of 9/11 plot and pilot
Abdul Aziz al Omari - Saudi Arabia
Wail al Shehri - Saudi Arabia
Waleed al Shehri - Saudi Arabia
Satam al Suqami - Saudi Arabia

United Airlines Flight 175
Fayez Banihammad - United Arab Emirates
Ahmed al Ghamdi - Saudi Arabia
Hamza al Ghamdi - Saudi Arabia
Marwan al Shehhi - United Arab Emirates, pilot
Mohand al Shehri - Saudi Arabia

American Airlines Flight 77
Hani Hanjour - Saudi Arabia, pilot
Nawaf al Hazmi - Saudi Arabia
Salem al Hazmi - Saudi Arabia
Khalid al Mihdhar - Saudi Arabia
Majed Moqed - Saudi Arabia

United Airlines Flight 93
Saeed al Ghamdi - Saudi Arabia
Ahmad al Haznawi - Saudi Arabia
Ziad Jarrah - Lebanon, pilot
Ahmed al Nami - Saudi Arabia

I don't recall the Saudi Govt ever apologozing , explaining.......Or Little bush discussing the threads of how certain Royal Family members funded this effort
 
I was in Salt Lake City for a major national corporate meeting (about 50 people there). Being a few hours behind, I had literally just gotten out of shower and turned TV on as I was getting suit and tie and dress shirt out.

They were live covering after the first one got hit showing the smoke and still questioning what it could have been. A small aircraft flying too low?

Then I saw the second one hit on live TV. Needless to say, when I first got downstairs to conference room, they already had a TV rolled in and first day was canceled, then all three days.

We had people from NYC, and some that knew or had family members in the buildings. They all scrambled to find rental cars to drive back cross country.

The rest of us were stuck in a downtown Salt Lake hotel until the airlines opened again several days later.
 
mpaer said:
HIjackers
American Airlines Flight 11
Mohamed Atta - Egypt, tactical leader of 9/11 plot and pilot
Abdul Aziz al Omari - Saudi Arabia
Wail al Shehri - Saudi Arabia
Waleed al Shehri - Saudi Arabia
Satam al Suqami - Saudi Arabia

United Airlines Flight 175
Fayez Banihammad - United Arab Emirates
Ahmed al Ghamdi - Saudi Arabia
Hamza al Ghamdi - Saudi Arabia
Marwan al Shehhi - United Arab Emirates, pilot
Mohand al Shehri - Saudi Arabia

American Airlines Flight 77
Hani Hanjour - Saudi Arabia, pilot
Nawaf al Hazmi - Saudi Arabia
Salem al Hazmi - Saudi Arabia
Khalid al Mihdhar - Saudi Arabia
Majed Moqed - Saudi Arabia

United Airlines Flight 93
Saeed al Ghamdi - Saudi Arabia
Ahmad al Haznawi - Saudi Arabia
Ziad Jarrah - Lebanon, pilot
Ahmed al Nami - Saudi Arabia

I don't recall the Saudi Govt ever apologozing , explaining.......Or Little bush discussing the threads of how certain Royal Family members funded this effort
Click to expand...

I have no idea what we did to deserve two allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.
 
Was living in Colorado at the time, so also a couple of hours behind the east coast.

Was driving to work when the first plane hit, and the second hit as I was walking from the parking lot into the building. Saw a group of about 10 co-workers huddled around a common area TV, and we watched in stunned silence. We had a guy on our team who had retired from military intelligence about a year earlier and he broke the silence with “I’d bet anything it was that fucker Bin Laden”.
 
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