9/11 As it happened

[sharkbitten]

My wife and I had gone to the Monday Night Football game the night before between the Broncos and Giants and we got home late Monday night. Tuesday morning (9/11), I called in to work sick at 6 am Denver time and went back to sleep. Next thing I know, a few hours later, I hear my wife yelling for me and I knew something strange was happening by the tone of her voice. At first, I thought something was wrong with our 5 month old daughter. She runs in and tells me to turn on the tv and that the Pentagon had been hit by an aircraft and that the WTC has been hit also and collapsed.
We watched the coverage all day in total amazement and disbelief. It was like someone said earlier-we felt like we shouldn't turn it off, so we saw the same images over, and over, and over. Around dinner time was the first time we turned off the tv all day. We were so numb from seeing all of those images. A lot of those images are still burned into my brain.

I work for an aircraft charter company and one of our aircraft was allowed to fly blood and other emergency supplies into New York from Bonfils Blood Center and from FEMA a few days after the attack but prior to any other civilian aircraft in the US being allowed to fly. I talked to the pilots later. They said it was really strange being the only aircraft in the sky and all the radios being silent. They also said they could see the smoke from ground zero from over 200 miles out.

[ChipWrecked]

I'm not a 9/11 conspiracy theorist but there is something very suspicious about NORAD's "stand down" "exercise" status i.e. inability to scramble for over an hour.

NORAD will be in "stand down" status in two days, Sept. 14th.

[Hopey]

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And to think how a government could allow that to happen to its own people.

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Keep your retarded conspiracy theories in Politics, please.

[Blarg]

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the most horrifying thing was seeing the people falling from the buildings. what a horrible sight.

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Yeah, that really shook me up. Some people can turn off their empathy pretty easily, but to me it was really vivid and I couldn't get away from it.

They stopped showing the footage pretty quickly, which is a shame I think. You shouldn't censor some things. There is no need to make them pretty and I think it's actually a bad thing to try to clean up the horror and make it in any way presentable. Happy and kid-safe, this kind of thing just isn't. And it strikes me as awful to think that it should be thought so or treated as such.

There was also a series of pictures of "the falling man," a guy who was going down, on fire, I think. It was buried and tucked out of the public consciousness very quickly. I think it needed to stay right out front and center.

[swede554]

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There was also a series of pictures of "the falling man," a guy who was going down, on fire, I think. It was buried and tucked out of the public consciousness very quickly. I think it needed to stay right out front and center.

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I agree with your comment that we shouldn't censor anything as it is happening, however, I do disagree with the above statement. The reason I say that is because we do not need to show video of individual people dying in events such as these to understand the magnitude of the event taking place. More importantly, I think it shouldn't not be aired repeatedly out of respect to family and friends who lost people in this attack, but are unusure how they demised. Imagine having lost a loved one, and everytime you see video of someone falling out of the towers wondering if that's the person you love.

That said, I'm firmly against censorship. I believe any video available should be aired as it initially becomes available, and then be available to be viewed by everyone chosing to do so, ie. on the news stations websites.

[Blarg]

I don't think this makes sense in some ways. Do you not show footage of bombs going off in Pearl Harbor because someone wonders if one of their loved ones is being shown or could be shown? Or even knows their loved one was killed in a ship that got bombed? Or other war footage? No. In fact doing so can be asserted, and I think fairly and successfully, as an attempt to pretty up a reality the terribleness and impact of which we need to acknowledge, not suppress or paint a prettier picture of. How about Katrina's wrecked homes and lives, or those that resulted from the Asian tsunami?

Now if the violent death being shown was of a a single individual, or at least if the guy was recognizable, that's different. But this was death in the thousands, and who knows who that guy was? He was representative of the full measure of the terror and sadness of the event, perhaps more clearly, at least to me, than any other thing I've seen, heard, or read about 9/11. The enormously sad, frightening, terrible things like that which can happen to an ordinary unsuspecting non-combatant to me says a lot of what terrorism is all about. Not just here, but everywhere. It's as powerful at conveying that as perhaps anything I will ever see.

Those factors combine to make this seem quite newsworthy to me. I have talked to many people who didn't even know people were leaping, on fire, to their deaths on 9/11. That kind of mental image can shake you up. And I think it's necessary to get a stiff shaking, as we think about the true consequences of the roles our country plays in the world. I applaud anything that makes people really take it within them and start to think hard about it.

Now, in those mid-east kidnapping and murders, because we know exactly whose head is being sawed off with a knife, and it's only one guy, I would agree that we don't need to see his individual torture and final death and degradation at the hands of his killers.

[katyseagull]

Curious what your thoughts are on making light of these pictures where people are falling off the buildings by attaching a joke to them. Do you think that humor truly helps some people cope with the situation or do you think the joke-pictures are just juvenile and in very poor taste?

I ask this because of the threads in ATF and in OOT. Dids made the comment that people "wigged" out because of the joking around. I think posting pics and making light of the tragedy is disrespectful but evidently not everyone agrees.

[Blarg]

News coverage works differently to me than jokes do. I generally don't like it when it seems like someone is feeding off other people's pain for a cheap thrill or any kind of satisfaction. That's why I don't stare at car wrecks when I go by. Jokes that are too callous and exploitive can make the teller seem creepy and cheap. I wouldn't much dig a joke about the falling man.

The Hulk Hogan montage of shots around the WTC didn't bother me though. Again, that's more about a national event than a particular individual's pain being exploited or negated. I see no reason to think that the guy who made the hulk hogan montage either doesn't think 9/11 was terrible or is encouraging anyone else to feel that way. This is an event we'll be thinking about and hearing about for the rest of our lives. Jokes about it are inevitable. It's just how they're done, when they're done. If anything could be more harmless and ridiculous than asserting it was Hulk Hogan who did all the damage, I'm at a loss to what it could be.

One of the funnier things I remember in recent years was a New Yorker cartoon that came out the week after 9/11. Audacious timing, but in retrospect, perfect and even a little courageous. As was The Onion's issue that week. The cartoon showed a guy and a girl on a couch at home. The man says, "If you don't give me a [censored], the terrorists will have won." It was such a huge relief to be able to laugh again. By the way, the Onion issue was enormously popular in New York, too.