1. Keith Olbermann's emotional commentary.
2. I work in a newsroom. It's an office with no walls -- a big, well-lit space about the size of a warehouse, filled with desks, computers and ceiling-mounted television screens, all tuned to news stations. So, when the first plane hit, we knew what was going on.
My first reaction is on my Livejournal -- it's the only thing on there that's not quoted from email or message board posts elsewhere. "Carlo Giuliani, thou art avenged." This was before the buildings actually collapsed -- before the second plane hit, I think. (Although I'm not sure on that.) I'm not sure I'm proud of that, but it's honest.
Carlo Giuliani was a protester beaten to death by police outside the big world trade summit in Italy earlier that year. So, right away, I saw the thing as an act in a cultural war against the hegemony -- the world traders. I still think that's what the attack was about. I still think the religious angle is secondary, in some ways. It's a way to give form to an underlying need for resistance. The form is important, but the resistance is deeper than that. It's ongoing. And because I wrote that down in a place where (theoretically) everyone could see it, I remember that.
Then, I remember the buildings falling, and people around me stopped pretending to work and just stood up and clustered around the TVs, which made a sort of weird image. And I remember getting really worried about a friend of mine -- I'd just visited New York that summer and walked past the WTC plaza from the PATH station to his office, and I knew that if he'd taken a later train, he'd have been right there. But he made it on his early train. I worked the phones and the email, calling him, his wife, and a few other friends in New York, checking up, making sure they were OK.
I also, corny as it sounds, remember Barbelith. By hitting refresh on a couple of threads on here, I was getting information faster than the newswires. People around me started asking what was going on, because I was ahead of the TV news. And these "internet updates" I was getting were from real people who I regularly interacted with, which made the thing much more personal and real and human. They weren't simply reciting facts, but reacting in shock, amusement, horror, annoyance. They were involved, and that meant in some way that I was involved. These were my friends. Not just neighbors or countrymen, but friends. Click. Refresh. Are you still there? Can you get home? Is your family OK?
For one poster who I truly respected (not around too much any more), the answer was "no," and I'm not likely to forget that.
My memories of 9/11 are also tangled up in the anthrax thing that happened a month later, because all the people who I'd called in New York on that day called me back, saying things like, "Now it's *our* turn to worry." Which was nice, at the time. There are a lot of unanswered questions about that attack, and it sometimes seems forgotten because, well, it's not quite as dramatic or symbolic as 9/11, and only one guy died down here. But he was a friend of mine, and friend of my father's, and besides, it could have been me. So my involvement with that is tied into my reactions to 9/11, too. And I'm not going to forget that, either. |
