So.....

[Atticus]

I get angry at the why it happened -- what could we have possibly done to make people hate us/our lifestyle so much that they relentlessly plan for years to make something like that happen. What could we have done to prevent it -- not from a law-enforcement standpoint, but rather from a human standpoint. Give more? Spend less? Be less sanctimonious in our approach to Palestinian rights? Something?

 

Then I get angry at our response -- using a fist and not an open hand. This approach has never solved anything permanently (see Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia for reference) -- only temporarily. As is being borne out RIGHT NOW in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

That's an interesting point of view. You hear the cliched story of the girl who got raped who was wearing slutty clothes, out late drinking, etc. etc. and then the attendant firestorm of arguments of "she was asking for it" vs. "no one deserves to be raped." I think the same kind of logistical circle can come up when thinking about our role as Americans in getting attacked... In other words, could we have done better with our foreign policy? Could be less materialistic? Could we show other cultures more respect? etc. etc. Well, maybe, but that's still no justification for murdering innocent civilians. I have a real hard time with the critics who say we brought this all upon ourselves, but there are good arguments on all sides of these issues.

 

But you raise the interesting point of how we responded, and it's got me thinking...

 

[embiggen]

jess,

 

did you live up here at the time and work in the city?

 

my biggest memory, aside from the melted plastic smell, was thinking about the cars at the ferry lot down the hill from my house that didn't get picked up and that we were happy that our older kids were only 2 at the time so they hadn't started school yet.

 

I think there were 37 victims from my town so we figured if they had started school, it was inevitable that we would have personnally know many more who died. (rather than only knowing of them or knowing them by which house the family lived in, ect...

 

edit: sorry, i just saw your post about being in TN at the time

 

actually, my husband and I came here a month afterwards for a wedding. the closer downtown we got, we could smell fuel in the air. it's funny, people were so much nicer to each other here at that time. I wish they still were.

[gogo]

the main headlines locally about it here are with regards to people who have become extremely ill after working down there for week after week in the horribly polluted air. people who worked at the site are getting cancer and other horrible things at an advanced rate.

my biggest memory, aside from the melted plastic smell...

actually, my husband and I came here a month afterwards for a wedding. the closer downtown we got, we could smell fuel in the air.

Article from two years after, about air quality following 9/11

 

It's amazing to me that more people didn't stop to think about what was/could have been floating around down there at the time. I was at the site twice, for a week each time, in the two months after. Part of my job was distributing respirators to people working on the pile, and then trying to convince them to actually wear them. Not much luck there.

 

More surprising to me were the people who lived in the neighborhood, who were desparate to get back into their homes. I can understand the emotional need to do that, but people just should not have been living down there in the immediate aftermath. At one point I saw a pregnant woman walking out of her apartment building, apparently just heading out for work, not 10 blocks from the site. I was stunned that anyone would take a chance like that.

[plasticeyeball]

sorry the niceness wore off so quickly.

 

i'd hold the door for you if i saw you coming.

 

(but then again, i'm not from ny either)

[anodyne]

it seems like so many people lost people close to them that day. i can't see sept. 11 on a calendar and not think of some of my internet buddies who've lost brothers, sisters, girlfriends and others.

 

fortunately for me, i didn't lose anyone personally that day, but i have solidarity with those who did, as most of us do. i've always been a bitchy person on the fringe of the mainstream, but i felt such a bond with everyone that day (and in the immediate, non-partisan aftermath). it wasn't that we were americans per se, but that we were humans and were forced to look at each other in a big-picture sense rather than the petty day-to-day squabbling.

 

sadly, that's one of my biggest partisan complaints about bush. he really blew being a good leader with his partisan hackery to redivide a country that hadn't been that united in 60 years.

[Atticus]

it seems like so many people lost people close to them that day. i can't see sept. 11 on a calendar and not think of some of my internet buddies who've lost brothers, sisters, girlfriends and others.

 

fortunately for me, i didn't lose anyone personally that day, but i have solidarity with those who did, as most of us do. i've always been a bitchy person on the fringe of the mainstream, but i felt such a bond with everyone that day (and in the immediate, non-partisan aftermath). it wasn't that we were americans per se, but that we were humans and were forced to look at each other in a big-picture sense rather than the petty day-to-day squabbling.

 

sadly, that's one of my biggest partisan complaints about bush. he really blew being a good leader with his partisan hackery to redivide a country that hadn't been that united in 60 years.

 

It kind of begs the question, though, of whether any leader, from any party, could keep that kind of unity going for an extended period of time, in the context of the dog-eat-dog political two-party climate (power struggle). I agree with you that Bush dropped the ball on that account. I just wonder how long members of one party (not in power) would have continued to stay "united" with the leaders of the other party in power. Too cynical?

[anodyne]

as long as the leader felt a party identity stronger than a human identity, that rift would happen. trying to turn a tragedy into political captial certainly hastened the split.

 

i guess i'd rather have someone in the oval office who was bad at politics and good at being a human.

[quarter23cd]

I'm numb to the coverage--or at least I've erected a helluva lot of metal-barriers to blot-out the endless 9/11 blather.

 

My fiancee and I had just moved to NYC about a month beforehand. Didn't know much of the city, didn't know many people there, didn't know what to do or think when things started happening that day. Thankfully, we were both working outside the city that day. Still, it was scary. I grew up outside of Washington, DC and my family still lives there. I remember being scared out of my mind that nearly everybody I most loved were in NYC or Washington, and I was having trouble contacting any of them.

 

Of the coverage--yeah, I remember listening to it and watching it, but most of it is a blur. The part that still gives me shivers is when they first reported people jumping.

 

I remember being amazed that although I felt like I hardly knew a soul in NYC, as a recent transplant there, I knew several people directly or indirectly affected by loss or injury. Everybody knew somebody.

 

My memories of that day are very personal, and by that I mean that the moments that give me pause are when I reflect on the human loss that day. And, frankly, I get irritable as hell anymore when I hear politicians/pundits/whoever talk about that day. Because anymore, all I hear when people talk about what that day meant to us as a nation or whatever--well, I don't really hear the humanity. I do, however, hear wounded pride. Nationalism. "OMFG, can you believe they did that to us on our own fucking soil? Lets get 'em!!! Woooooooo!!!!!! "

 

I feel disconnected from that. My stomach turns at it and I feel like we're missing the point. There will undoubtedly be some eloquent commentary about that day over the next few days, but right or not, I think I'm mostly going to tune it out. Doesn't mean I won't be remembering, tho.

[owl]

That's an interesting point of view. You hear the cliched story of the girl who got raped who was wearing slutty clothes, out late drinking, etc. etc. and then the attendant firestorm of arguments of "she was asking for it" vs. "no one deserves to be raped." I think the same kind of logistical circle can come up when thinking about our role as Americans in getting attacked... In other words, could we have done better with our foreign policy? Could be less materialistic? Could we show other cultures more respect? etc. etc. Well, maybe, but that's still no justification for murdering innocent civilians. I have a real hard time with the critics who say we brought this all upon ourselves, but there are good arguments on all sides of these issues.

 

But you raise the interesting point of how we responded, and it's got me thinking...

 

 

I don't think that level-headed critics would try to justify the murder of innocent civilians by saying that "we asked for it."

 

For example, I disagree with the response post-Afghanistan, but I sincerely sympathize with all innocent victims and understand the horriffic magnitude of the attack. And my disagreement—and wishes that we'd make more efforts to change—do not equate to "we asked for it."

 

If you want to use your analogy, perhaps you have to allow first that such an attack is always unjustified, although a person's/country's attitudes, behaviors, and actions, etc. may allow attackers to rationalize their actions or future plans, which should always be something to avoid.

 

In other words, the rape victim didn't deserve to be raped, but maybe she will never dress as over-the-top seductively or get as intoxicated. In that sense, America has hardly changed or learned. In my view, we've done the opposite and become more arrogant—often out of irrational pride or even spite.

 

If the girl were President Bush, after the attack, she would be wearing even more seductive clothes and getting even more drunk.

[bjorn_skurj]

1. Ani DiFranco needs a fucking editor, among other things.

2. I don't subscribe to any theory that says we brought 9/11 on ourselves. If one wants to take a phenomenological view of it and not assign blame for a second, one could look at al-Qaida as a form of asymmetrical warfare waged by people who are completely opposed to the Western way of life. They think that by allowing religious freedom and not having a theocracy we ARE DOING EXACTLY THE WRONG THING. They also think that because of the puissance and pervasiveness of American culture ("Democracy, whiskey, sexy!), our behaving like we do will, if not challenged, destroy Islam and THEIR way of life.

This is not my original idea. I'm channeling, and not nearly as eloquently as the original, the main theme Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. While I disagree with him on Iraq, he speaks with a great deal of insight about the roots of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and touches on a number of other interesting topics.

 

Terror and Liberalism

 

Like Rise of the Vulcans, I recommend this book without reservation to all who want to get some kind of grip on what the hell is going on in our world.

That said, has the United States contributed to making an environment where al-Qaida can metastize into the biggest current security threat to ourselves and our allies? Oh, hell yes. Let's face it - we're an empire now, and it sucks to be on the receiving end of imperialism. It makes most people angry, and it makes a fraction of people so angry that they want to kill themselves to get back at us. We've aligned ourselves with a whole bunch of really evil people over the last 100 years or so and more or less ignored the "expanding freedom" concept, unless it suits our business and/or security interests. And this is bipartisan- both Dem and GOP administrations have let this go on. And I'll say it again: Our actions in Iraq squandered the world's post-9/11 good will toward us. We're scary enough to the rest of the world - remember, we have the power to destroy anybody or everybody in less than a half-hour - and terrifying when we act unilaterally.

I also think all of this is part of the "globalization" process, where our modern way of thinking is now rubbing up against the pre-Enlightenment thinking in the Middle East. Either we're going to have to come up with some way of living with one another, or this struggle will go on until one form of thinking or the other prevails. The world may not be big enough for both of us.

[plasticeyeball]

Article from two years after, about air quality following 9/11

 

It's amazing to me that more people didn't stop to think about what was/could have been floating around down there at the time. I was at the site twice, for a week each time, in the two months after. Part of my job was distributing respirators to people working on the pile, and then trying to convince them to actually wear them. Not much luck there.

 

More surprising to me were the people who lived in the neighborhood, who were desparate to get back into their homes. I can understand the emotional need to do that, but people just should not have been living down there in the immediate aftermath. At one point I saw a pregnant woman walking out of her apartment building, apparently just heading out for work, not 10 blocks from the site. I was stunned that anyone would take a chance like that.

 

gogo, you know where i live. if you look at a map i think it's 12 miles straight north over water to the verrazano bridge.

 

that's how far the smell carried strongly enough to wake us up thinking something in the house was on fire. instead, it was just the wind changing direction. i couldn't imagine how bad the air was right there.

[Mr. Kinsley]

letter from Senate Democratic Leadership to ABC:

 

Letter

 

At least they're fair--I remember them sending a similar letter to Michael Moore before he unleashed Fahrenheit 9/11

 

The thing that I didn't know about that movie that I just learned from that letter is that Scholastic Book Clubs is going to distribute the movie to schools as an educational tool.

Before I was kind of taking a 'well, if you don't like it, don't watch it' approach, but this changes everything. The amount of people coming forward about this who've had dealings with the production, who're saying that a big chunk of it is fictionalized is absolutely terrifying.

 

As for the CNN coverage, I plan to TiVo it. I wasn't watching TV that morning. I was in a school, expecting to go in to help turn back students to go home. The day went on as planned and my 3rd graders had no concept of what was going on outside the safety of our campus. And to a large extent neither did I. I remember being glued to the TV as soon as I got home everyday for about a month.

 

Besides the tragedy and loss of life, I can't help but get pissed off about the annoying little things that popped up out of that day. Just stupid shit like taking your shoes off at the airport and the crawl at the bottom of damn near all TV programming.

[myboyblue]

Aside from the absolute horror of the tragedy that was 9/11, one of my most permanent memories was of work. I was in the Chicagoland area at work when it actually happened. My boss called me on the way into work and told me what was unfolding. We were on the phone when the 2nd plane hit the towers. I remember that you couldn't get anything on the internet. It was completely bogged down.

 

More vividly, I remember my boss coming into work and trying to work like it was a normal day. My work had set up big TVs to watch the coverage. My boss and I got into an argument about work. I told him that he should send everyone home as it was pointless to be at work. I tried to explain how important this was for our country and it seemed to escape him. I left to spend time with my family. I didn't see the point in being at work at all. I'll never forget the feeling that the country (minus my boss evidently) had for weeks after.

[Mr. Kinsley]

More vividly, I remember my boss coming into work and trying to work like it was a normal day.

Here in LA, all schools were open for a normal business day. We were instructed that if the kids brought it up, that it was OK to talk about it with them, but otherwise don't force it. They didn't bring it up for a week, except for that morning when one of the boys said, "I hear there's another plane headed for LA!" (He was actually excited about that prospect.)

 

Time magazine has a monthly school version called TIME for Kids. They had a special issue about 9/11 for their next edition. When we were looking at it in class one of my girls came up to me and said, "If you want I can bring in the real TIME magazine about 9/11. It shows pictures of people falling out of the buildings!" She too was excited about it. Then it hit me - for alot of these kids it was just like the movies. They were desensitized to violence. It meant nothing to them. Some kids were genuinely terrified and had nightmares, but for the ones who went to see non-age appropriate action movies and played a lot of video games, they had a very skewed reality.

[mountain bed]

Perhaps the 'legacy' of 9/11,such as it is,is how we have reacted to it.The thing that distresses me the most is that it seems like our reaction in the wake of is nearly as devastating as the act itself....the rise once again of the xenophobes & uber-patriots who seem willing to shred the Constitution to support their paranoia.

 

Post-Pearl Harbor,the 'greatest generation' came together (for the most part).I recently was talking to my uncle from OK about the political climate here today...here was a guy who did 2 tours in Vietnam,got spit at when he returned,and who by his own admission had a looong road back to dealing with that.He unequivocably stated that this country is more divided now than it was then,and in his opinion perhaps more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

 

In terms of those who live/work in big towns like Chicago,NYC,etc...who have that thought run through their mind every time they step on the subway...awareness is fine,but don't let it be overcome by fear..there is a difference between the two.Folks that live in Jerusalem or Beirut have had to deal with this every single DAY for ever & ever.I guess that now we're no different,but we can't let it make us catatonic nor should we become more fascist in our governing.

[Spawn's dad]

the artifical constructions of anniversaries interest me as much as anything else as regards 9/11. I'm not any more moved, sadder, or affected on the 5th anniversary than I was on the 4th, nor than I suspect I will be on the 6th. Truth is there's a hole in the ground in lower Manhattan every day for the past 5 years, and it's there everyday of the year. I've seen it in all seasons..it doesn't go away. The people I know who lost husbands or children on that day aren't sadder on september 11th, they live with loss evers day. I'd venture to say they're sadder on thanksgiving and christmas, birthdays and other important personal and family holidays. to act as if 5 is somehow super important is nothing more than bowing to the media giants who get to convince us that we can't spend that day without tuning into what they have to show us which is just an easy pay day for them. they trot out some old footage, tell us what we all already know, and they cash the big checks for the advertising dollars. there's a million inovative ways to honor the memory of those who died. I'm sure there are kids in need of pen pals. I'm sure there are those with financial hardships and those, as referenced above with serious health issues. None of those problems go away on the 12th. watching cnn isn't going to change the course of anyone's life, but I bet there are ways we all could find that would.

[bjorn_skurj]

Well said, Gary.

[mountain bed]

letter from Senate Democratic Leadership to ABC:

 

Letter

 

At least they're fair--I remember them sending a similar letter to Michael Moore before he unleashed Fahrenheit 9/11

whatdisay,thanks for the link I read ahead & didn't read this earlier,shame on me.

 

liberal leaning media,indeed

[awatt]

 

 

 

 

[owl]

If you ask me, it's not that the media is liberal or conservative leaning, it's that it all stinks! That's one reason why I don't watch television.

[anodyne]

is anyone watching the ABC dramatization tonight? i think we're going to watch the simpsons instead of some partisan version of the events.

[owl]

It's kind of odd that Fox is really hyping the Simpsons to compete with September 11 programming.

[embiggen]

I'm not going to watch any of it. it's getting to be overkill. it's sad enough hearing the names. I don't need to re-live any of it on television.

[anodyne]

i do plan on watching some of cnn tomorrow. that'll be more than enough.

[Edie]

I watched much of the Naudet brothers' 9/11 on CBS. Words fail me.