9/11

Five years already?

I still remember it clear as anything, wondering if any of my friends in New York or, indeed, that part of the country had been in there. I hadn't been in for very long and was jumping through channels when I noticed a large building fire on one of the news channels, and sat there shaking my head. How could a plane hit that building, was there some kind of malfunction, did something go wrong - when the second plane streaked in and hit the other tower.

Right there I knew this was bad-guys at work. America has a lot of enemies, and this was what they were doing. I sat there, watching as people threw themselves out of the building, choosing to die by gravity and not fire. The emergency services working as hard as they could while facing impossible odds. And then the towers came down.

For the entire day I sat there in silence, shaking my head at the devestation, checking my email almost constantly, making sure friends were OK. I spoke with my sister - Gemmas company had offices there and they lost a lot of friends.

And then the idiots started. Nostradamus preditcted it, the Wingdings font shows it, the govenment did it, and selling the rubble on ebay. If you can bet on anything, it would be that the intarweb-idiots can make anything a mighty evil conspiracy.

And so here we are, five years on. I'm not going into the political side of things as - to be honest - it's not worth it.

Are things any different five years later? Are we safer or more at risk?

To those of you that lost a loved one, lost a friend, or lost a relative... The world grieves with you today.

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One Response to “9/11”

Anonymous said...

I was reading in Time magazine that the reason conspiracy theories abound so much after events like this is because they help people make sense of what are, essentially, random events. As much as they make good reading, it's little more than a coping mechanism.

It was a scary time - I have a sister and three nephews in NYC. The oldest one saw the 2nd plane hit and both towers come down, after coming out of a train station. My sister was on antidepressants for months afterwards, and told me that whenever the underground trains halted - for any reason, like they do - people freaked out. And you could still smell death.

I hope nothing on this scale happens again, but what can we do?

china blue