Feb
6th
2024
I've Always Been Old, Even When I Was Young · 9:10pm February 6th
Today at school (i.e. work), a first-grader stopped me in the halls to ask if I knew about "When there were two buildings in New York and they flew planes into them and they fell down and half the people died."
Rather than get into the details with him, I simply responded, "Yes, I was in high school when it happened, it was very sad."
To that, he replied, "No, this was a long time ago."
So yeah, here's your reminder that time keeps advancing at a rate of one year per year. Heck, not only do kids today not remember 9/11, but even their parents are now mostly too young to remember it, at the lower grades.
As the kids say, Big Oof.
I was driving to Topeka for an office visit at work when the first plane hit. The thing that struck me the most was the news media was completely oblivious to what was going on. NPR sounded like scattered sheep. The only reliable news was our local TV station because the rest of them froze on ten seconds of film repeated ten thousand times, much like when the Challenger exploded. They had their clip, they were going to play it until it burned. With radio at least they could 'look around' and give more context. By evening, they had set their 'narrative' and actually tried to do some reporting, although the red herrings were about hip deep for days afterward.
Despite the seriousness of the topic, I can't help laughing.
I too was in high school. Specifically, my second high school, the private one. It was one of the extremely few days that I happened to be at the recreation center, about fifteen minutes before attending a history class. I recall the teacher, one Dr. Finley, remarking, "The world doesn't stop even in the face of disaster" before informing us that the class would proceed as usual. Which it did. I didn't find out about the second tower until after I finished the rest of the day's classes.
One of my friends used to work in United Airlines. I remember I was in my first year of college when that happened. I didn't see the news immediately, someone called me, I think it was my mom, and she said: They crashed a plane into the Twin Towers. Then the news started coming in and I was already messaging and calling my friend as I drove back home. We were glued to the tv watching as more planes crashed, news showed the horrifying scenes of people trying to escape the towers, etc. I didn't hear from my friend until later that day when she let me know she was safe. I still remember the panic I felt for my friend, but also the incredulity of what was happening, and the horror at what we were watching happen. Even when I wasn't in the US it was something that shook the world.
Among other horrors and things I have witnessed or lived through even peripherally, there's a feeling that nothing like it could be forgotten... but I guess that is the important part of remembering and documenting... otherwise a book ban, or even just silence will do away with things we should always remember in some way or another.
big oof indeed! :')
On the day I was born, World War II had been over for just a little less than fifteen years.
That's, like, 2009 today.
World War I had been over for a bit less than 42 years.
That's 1983.
If you add my wife's age to mine, subtract it from the current year and then use that to set the W.A.Y.B.A.C machine, you'll go back before the Spanish-American war.
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/timeghost.png
One of the Airmen working in our personnel section war born four years after 9/11, when I was in Iraq for my first tour.
I was a kid back then. Old enough that I remember it, but not old enough to have understood or particularly cared at the time. I saw it on the news. It seemed like a bigger deal than most other news, but I didn't really get why, because it seemed to me that the news was always depressing and horrible, so I shrugged and moved on.
Later that week, I made the Twin Towers out of Lego in a dentist waiting room. My mother very quietly but very emphatically told me to not do that.
I was an adult by then, though only a young one. I first saw the news in the local shop where there was a pile of evening newspapers on the counter. (Even that detail seems redolent of a lost world now.) Upside down and half covered as they were, I got the impression that it had been a light plane and wondered why it was worthy of the front page of a British regional paper. I didn't realise the full story until I got home. I had internet, but of course in 2001 I didn't have it on the move.
Here on the West Coast:
I was working the late shift at the library that day--didn't hafta be in till 2PM--so by the time I was stirring awake and turning on the radio at 7AM, everything back east had already happened...
Mike
I was driving though the countryside, and had only spotty radio reception. The radio announcers had very little idea what was going on, and felt free to invent their own narratives, which were of the "total panic WW3" variety. I remember hearing more than once that some planes had crashed into buildings, and more than a thousand airplanes were missing or not responding. So I was relieved when I finally got to a TV and found out only 7 large buildings had been destroyed
I was 31 years and a month on that fateful day and was stuck in a massive traffic jam on the A30 just outside Bodmin in Cornwall with my van running on the dregs of diesel left in the tank when the radio started reporting plane crashes in New York. I can still see as clear as day where the single carriage way at Temple became dual carriage way and the ranks of stationary cars.
5767072
I must have been a year or two older. Still very much a kid, but a little more aware of the magnitude (if not the gravity) of the tragedy.