Office Workers fleeing spread of debris from falling Twin Towers on 9/11. © Jason Florio/Corbis
Time magazine has recently posted a NIST photo collection about 9/11 (here) and German researchers from the University of Mainz have conducted a minute-by-minute study of emotions during September 11 as the attack and tragedy unfolded, based on a study of text messages (here). These sources were available on Wikileaks (here). Speculations on the Wikileaks source are at reddit.com here.
At the time, I was working two part time jobs, the first video arcade, the second a pharmacy/convenience store, both in the same mall. I didn't turn on the news that morning, I just ate breakfast, showered and biked my way to work. Bicycle, not motorcycle.
ReplyDeleteAt a major intersection, A guy in a van had his window open and I heard radio chatter about "a plane hitting a tower". I assumed there had been a plane crash at an airport that took out one of the air traffic control towers.
So I get into work, turn on the machines, open the doors, and my first customer of the day is the one who tells me about the attacks.
I said "WHAT?!?"
Spent most of that shift glued to a radio. Then went to the second job. The mall was shutting down around us, and the manager of the pharmacy/convenience store was shouting down the phone to corporate to let us go, since everyone else was gone. Took him like half an hour to convince them that yes, given the national emergency, the mall was shutting down early for the day.
So I get home, and my email is full of "so and so is in New York, have we heard from them?!?" Everyone I knew made it out alive. One of them, though, had been up on top of the towers fairly recently.
I could comment on the hows and the whys and the whats of that day, but that's been done seventy billion times. So instead I'll point out they should have had the new building done before now.
It was a watershed - things were not the same after that day than they had been before. And I think the Wikileaks source shows that terrible realization sinking in. That was certainly my experience. There was a point on that day when many people wondered if a world war was breaking out. I was living several thousand miles from my family, and with air traffic grounded, I realized there was no way of get home. That was just one of many sensations around this tragedy - not knowing what had happened, then slowly finding out, then realizing the whole world had changed.
ReplyDeleteI do not like the chatter around Wikileaks that suggests conspiracy theories. I plan to write on this blog about some of the conspiracy theories that characterize the turn of the Millennium. The conspiracy theories are a symptom of the times, but they do not explain the times. There's a good quote from Norman Mailer about conspiracy theories and how they cannot really explain the truth about momentous events: "Indeed, conceive of the genius of such a conspiracy. It would take criminals and confidence men mightier, more trustworthy and more resourceful than anything in this century or the ones before. Merely to conceive of such men was the surest way to know the event was not staged."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_hoax_in_popular_culture