9/11

[PS17]

I still remember vividly the whole day.

It was just another ordinary school day, I was in third grade sitting in Ms. Billetti's class. There were some announcements made by the principal on the PA system that teachers needed to shut the windows because of debris in the air from an "accident." Gradually, kids were getting picked up by their parents and the kids had no idea what was going on. Of course, my mom eventually came. My brother was a junior in HS at the time, and he was there in the car with my mom - along with two of his classmates which my mom picked up also.

I was told that two planes crashed into the twin towers. I had no idea at the time, why anyone would crash planes into the World Trade Center. 8 years later, I have a much better understanding of what happened. I am still utterly shocked, that we let Osama just slip away, while we went to bomb ****ing Iraq. I hope we find this sick human being one day, and make him pay, but it's not happening.

Rest in Peace & God Bless America.

September 11, 2009. Never forget.

[BURGERMIKE]

God bless.

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Sad but touching video.

Damn jaspegs, I opened the floodgates on that one.

[PatriotReign37]

Word.

I was in Seoul coming home from a night out and turned on the TV. I think about 5 hours later I had to turn the TV off

I was working on a big project in Fairway, KS and had to go home for something that I had forgot early morning. I dont know why, but I turned the TV on and the first tower was on fire. Needless to say I never went back to work.

[jetophile]

The problem is, Obama forgets.

From one of my favorite fields. That flag was planted the day it happened. I went to visit today. I trekked across with ticks on my face and crawling up my legs. Small penalty to pay.

[Verde]

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[Ghost]

Unreal. I feel so bad for the families that lost someone. I never even got to see the twin towers.

God bless America.

[Ghost]

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[Ghost]

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[joebabyny]

I wrote this a few years ago, my experience on that day.

Today is the 5 year anniversary of a day burned into the minds of every NYer, and most American's as well. If you are from NYC, or know people that are, you know that there are countless stories of people's personal involvement with this horrible day in our country's history. As someone who lived downtown and worked in the financial industry, I myself know of dozens of stories of friends and collueges, who was off that day from work and had their life spared, who switched days off with someone else and met their doom, who ran across the bridge in terror, who got caught in the dust storm when the building came down, and who lost a loved one that day. Admittedly, my story pales in comparison to the vast majority of tales of that day, and it is something I don't talk about as much as other events and experiences in my life, but on this day I just wanted to halt the absurd stories of my life and adventures, and take a somewhat serious moment to recount my day, to at least document it for myself so as not to ever forget what I was doing on the day of my generations day that will go down in infamy.

It was a gorgeous September morning that Tuesday. I had been out the night before at a Jameriqui concert dancing my ass off, so I was pulling a slacker move and heading into work a bit late. At the time I was living in a pretty large apartment building on Gold Street, right off of Fulton in downtown manhattan. I was pretty central between the east side and the west side, where the Towers stood framing the city skyline and acting as a beacon to NYC and America. Fulton street ran east to west and right into the north tower, so I was just 3 blocks from the Trade Center, and was loving life living in downtown Manhattan. At around 9 am I walked out to the elevator, and people were running around talking on the phone in a frenzied state, but I just wasn't paying attention to the random people, as NYers are accustomed to doing. When I got in the elevator, a very effeminate man was bugging out, and when I looked at him like the crazy screaming queen he was acting like, he informed me that a plane had just hit the WTC (World Trade Center). I walked outside to check out the show, like everyone else in my building, and made my way west toward the Towers. As I got to the side of the Millennium hotel which is right across the street from the Towers, a roar overcame downtown and I looked up to see the second plane smash into the second tower at full velocity. The best way to describe the first hand feel of the explosion is to compare it to the first Matrix movie, when Neo is on the rooftop and the chopper slams into the wall, creating this momentary waviness to the buildings, a buckle, before you hear the explosion. This is what it felt like when the intense heat plume and explosion rocked the buildings all around it. A flaming piece of something came flying down and landed maybe 5 feet in front of me. At this moment everyone on the street knew this was no accident, but a deliberate act, and pandemonium broke out. At once I realized I wasn't looking at some fire or rubbernecking in traffic checking out an accident, but looking at my friends from Cantor who were trapped in there, people from Fiduciary Trust and other companies who were likely trapped, then I witnessed things that really hit home and will never be forgotten for as long as I live, jumpers. I can only imagine the intense heat, the absolute despair that the trapped people were dealing with that would cause them to jump from one of the tallest buildings in the world. Looking at it you realized, these were not people that fell or were knocked out of the windows by accident or explosion, these were people who were consciously jumping, groups holding hands and taking their lives. The sights, and sounds, of that day are something that will haunt me forever, and what comes to mind every time I hear someone doubt our efforts overseas to make our country safer. After standing there for a few minutes, I snapped out of my daze and noticed handfuls of people, mostly women, laying on the ground screaming and crying for loved ones who were in that building. It was absolutely terrible and made worse by the fact that cell phones were totally knocked out because they all broadcast from the towers, so nobody could contact anybody. I rushed over to one woman who was screaming that she needed to call her son, and helped her up and over to a pay-phone where there were at least 20 people waiting on line. I walked to the front of the line to see some smart-ass wannabe broker kid on the phone bragging to his friends about being in front of the building watching it all. I grabbed the phone out of his hand and told him to step the **** away from the phone or I would beat him to death with it, and handed it to the woman. I ended up helping 4-5 people up who were lying on the ground, and then decided that if I didn't make it to the office in midtown my coworkers and family would get all crazy thinking something had happened to me. I ran down to the subway and hopped on what I think was the last running subway before they closed the system down. I was covered in dust, and drew looks from a lot of people on the train, most of whom had been on the subway through this whole thing and had no idea what was going on. I looked down at myself and saw the dust covering me, my shoes, and thought about that intense heat, and how that dust could easily partly be the ashes of human bodies, and I got sick. I walked into he office and over to the trading desk to watch on the screen just as the first tower came down. The room went silent, a lot of the people in that room had friends in that building who they would never see again, it was a very somber moment. A little while later the second building collapsed, and everyone started making their way out of the city. Since I obviously could not go to my place, and ground zero was between me and my family in Staten Island, I planned on heading out and staying with friends from work in Connecticut or Long Island, until good'ole mom threw a monkey wrench in my life. I got a call to the trading desk from mom, in her usual panic that generally would be accompanied by a handful of zanex and a pair of her darkest sunglasses, to inform me that I was going to have to go on a rescue mission. She had a friend, who had a friend, who had a son in Stuyvesent High School for gifted students. Turns out the kid was some book-smart genius who didn't have the common sense to find his way out of a refrigerator box. The kids in the school ran for their lives when the towers came down, so he was now wondering the city. Mom, in her act of kindness to a friend of a friend, volunteered her own genius son to help get the kid out of the war zone. Keep in mind, at the time of all this happening, the city was shut down and nobody had any idea if there were going to be other secondary attacks, either from the air or bombs on the ground. This kids parents guided the kid al the way to midtown to my office, where I was confronted by an absolute mess of a high-school kid. He looked like a character from the FarSide cartoons, the stereotypical nerd that you all made fun of in high school, or at least that I made fun of when I was a high school dickhead. He was extremely overweight and sweating like a hooker in church. I handed him 5 bucks in singles and parked him in front of the vending machines while I headed back to the office to thank my mother for making me run the gauntlet through the terrorist attack in the world's largest city which was absolutely shut down with more possible attacks all the while with this significantly large anchor tied to my ankle! We headed out without any real plan on how to get to Staten Island, but I figured just as with everything else in life, I would just throw myself in the pit and wing it. We started out on 48th and 5th, and got a tip from a police officer that there were ferries down by 32nd on the west side, so we walked down to 32nd and crossed over and 9 blocks to the west side, where we were told that the ferries were back north up at near 50th, so we huffed it back north, only to see a line of people that would keep us standing for at least 5 hours. The kid was already huffing and puffing and going into cardiac arrest, and I looked at him and said **** that, there was no way I was going to stand in one place for at least 5 hours today, this place was a giant target so I decided the only way to get out of here was to walk to at least Brooklyn, then pay off someone to drive us to Staten Island. We crossed the city and walked all the way downtown and found a train that was running across the river to Brooklyn. The kid would bitch that he needed to stop every block to rest and get something to drink and blah blah blah. I was a little rough on him, but in my defense, we had no idea what was going on and if attacks were going to start up again, so I did what I had to do. We rode across to Brooklyn, walked a few blocks onto fourth ave, and saw a bus approaching that was heading to the Island. It was a city express, and they do not stop at all in Brooklyn, so I ran into the middle of the six lane mini highway we were walking on, and jumped in front of the bus like a crazy son of a bitch and got him to stop. We hopped in and about 8 hours after our ordeal found ourselves back in Staten Island.

The next few days were surreal, as the stock-market broke it's regulations and closed for multiple days, leaving me with nothing to do but sit in front of the tv and watch the carnage and destruction in my backyard. After a few days, I hooked up with my roommate and we walked across the brooklyn bridge and went to our apartment to pick up some stuff. We had to show ID with our address to get into the area as it was locked down and patrolled by the national guard and had respirators and flashlights since the air was still thick with smoke and the power was still out downtown. Everywhere was covered in dust, and the debris was just obscene. I can still smell that burning chemical smell that wafted throughout downtown, another haunting memory of that day. The second wave of reality hit when me and my mother drove to the hospital on the east side where all the survivors where supposed to be taken. Thousands of people posted missing posters for family and loved ones, but as it became obvious that there were going to really be no survivors, it turned into a shrine for the dead. It is one thing to hear the numbers, around 3,000 dead, but it is another thing entirely to see the pictures of those thousands all posted in one place. It was the same story down in union square park when we went down there, with candlelight vigils and shrines set up all over for lost friends.

The one bright spot in all the tragedy of this horrible day, the one positive thing that could be taken from an event where thousands of innocent people lost their lives, was that immediately after this occurred, it changed the city and its inhabitants for the better. All of a sudden, that brash attitude was gone. Everyone understood that we all needed to stick together to get through this and help New York rise from the ashes, and people did their part. There was runs on the blood-banks and volunteers signing up to work around the clock. We went to the local costco to buy canned food and water to donate to the fire department, only to see countless others doing the same. All of the sudden, the big bad city realized that it wasn't so big, and we were all in it together, and it totally changed the mindset of New Yorkers to this day. For this reason alone, the terrorists failed miserably at their task, which is what all acts of terrorism strive for, to change a people's way of life through acts of terror. New York did not cower in the face of devastation, and NYers did not run in fear for long. By the end of the day on 9/11/01, there were hundreds of volunteers pouring into ground zero, and that pouring in only strengthened as the days went by and the death toll rose. it is a change of attitude and compassion that has lasted for five years, and I only hope will last for years to come from what is my generation's day that will live in infamy.

[jetophile]

Does anyone know that the Metropolitan Museum of Art pulled images of Mohammed? What a bunch of wusses. Is this N azi fukking Germany? We cater to these murdering a-holes, that's the problem. Religion of peace, show me some peace or otherwise kiss my ass.