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Remembering 9/11

HumblePi

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This isn't intended to become a political debate today, it's simply a way to honor those who perished on September 11, 2001. I thought it might be interesting to hear the stories of others as to what they were doing on that morning and how it affected them.

I was in work, as most of us were that morning, and was in the middle of a state inspection of the business. I was manager of a home respiratory company and we were inspected once a year by the State and Feds to be sure we were in compliance with all regulations.

We had a small television in a room we used for employee training videos. It was a little after 9 am and I was sitting in a small office going over records when one of my staff in the office let out a loud yell, 'Oh my God!'. I left the woman who was with me doing the inspection and ran out to the room with the television and saw that one of the twin towers had a lot of smoke billowing out of it. NBC had a bottom banner, "south tower hit by airplane".

Everyone gathered in front of that tiny television, absolutely shocked. The NY metropolitan area has several busy airports in close proximity to Manhattan and we had all heard of helicopters or small planes emergency landing in the Hudson River, but never a big jet and to crash into one of the towers?? No, that wasn't possible. We immediately started to take guesses as to what just happened, 'maybe the pilot had a heart attack' 'maybe the pilots lost control because of an electronic failure'. We didn't have to wait very long to realize that the US was under attack for not more than 15 or 20 minutes later, the north tower was hit and we all watched it live as it occurred.

Living within 50 miles of downtown Manhattan, we were accustomed to seeing the contrails of jets in the blue skies. After the second strike, the FAA shut down all airspace in the U.S. until two days later, Sept. 13th. I think driving to work the next two days was something that sticks in my mind, the skies were perfectly clear and free of either clouds or contrails. That morning of 9/11 was something nobody had experienced which was genuine fear of the U.S. being under siege. Would our kids be safe in school, should we keep them home? Would another city become a target of an airplane attack? What about the subways, were they safe? If two buildings in New York can be taken down to the ground in a pile of dust in just a couple of hours, what building or shelter could anyone be safe in? The fear and panic that followed that event was possibly even worse because then the videos came out, the 911 voice messages from people trapped were heard.

Whether we realize this or not, all of our lives changed on that day. Before 9/11 we were all pretty comfortable because we weren't at war with anyone and we felt pretty safe living in a country that only has two borders we share with allies, so we're isolated from 'all that bad stuff'. I don't think most of use even understood that there were people out there that hated us enough to commit such a heinous act. After 9/11 we understood that we weren't safe from terrorism. It was the day we all grew up.

I have photos of my son when he was young on a class trip to Manhattan and they were all taken up to the observation deck of one of the towers and took photographs up there. I have photos with him and his friends standing in Battery Park with the twin towers in the background. The day the towers were hit, he was an adult and living in Brooklyn, which is across the river from Manhattan. He went to to the waterfront to watch as it burned, then fell. He called me later that day to say that he was fine, wasn't in Manhattan when it happened but that he watched as they fell and reached up to papers raining down from the sky and those papers were things that had been on the desks or office files of those businesses, mundane office papers that someone may have been working on when the first plane struck.

Tonight, in New York City, two vertical columns of light will once again be lit in remembrance of the twin tower attacks. Those ghostly blue columns are a memorial to the souls that perished there.
 
I also remember that day!

Nobody else does?
 
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