I was born in the late '90s and as such have no real memories of that day. Like last post I have too many thoughts from Islam to the loss of community and more but I'll stop with two sentiments.
This post made me go down the rabbit hole of Flight 93 and it definitely makes me feel proud to be an American. From Alexander Solzhenitsyn's famous "we didn't love freedom enough," quote to how few victims of the Holocaust did anything to resist (except for the Bielski Partisans) I know the rule of history is most people stand by in the face of evil, but the people on Flight 93.
On the other hand, I do think next year's 25th 9/11 anniversary will be marred by the simple fact that the American people they tried to save and who came together afterwards are now calling for each other's deaths and in some rare cases actually taking steps to bring it about.
I'm almost ashamed I said nothing about United 93. Myself and others lament the fact Americans have so few contemporary heroes to build a national myth around. Well, what are Todd Beamer and the other passengers of 9/11, then? In fact, we don't honor Beamer and the passengers of United 93 enough. Where are their statues? I looked at the number of Beamer memorials and it's pathetic, honestly. I understand his family may prefer that his name not be larger than life, but still. If we're not going to lionize Beamer, if we're not going to build a national mythos out of someone like him, who would we build it out of?
With all due respect to Charlie Kirk, the honor he's receiving is totally out of proportion and quite ridiculous, actually. How many people associated with 9/11 have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
With Kirk I feel like it's the same thing that happened with that Shiloh Hendrix lady (whose name I had to look up); it's not so much about that we love the person as much as we hate the people who went after them. Enemy of my enemy is my friend I guess.
I flew in from San Francisco to NYC, where I lived at the time, the evening of September 10.
September 11 was a rare day off after having traveled, so I was home on the UES rather than at the office down in Chelsea. The phone rang at 9, my friend across the park calling to tell me to turn on the TV as a plane had hit the WTC. We spent the next few hours watching the destruction in real time.
We met up in the park, to have some grasp at normalcy. Thousands of others had the same idea, and we all discovered that Manhattan was locked down, that phones didn't work, that jet fighters patrolled the skies, that ten thousand deaths were expected. As we made our way downtown on foot we saw the MTA buses headed uptown, hundreds of passengers hanging on to roofs and exteriors as if we had somehow transported to Delhi. We smelled the burning, saw the lines hundreds deep at the banks, heard the ambulances racing to sites of death and horror before we saw the thousands of body bags they had staged along the WSH.
The homes of friends and co-workers, destroyed. The deaths of strangers no less abhorrent for their anonymity. I was 35 then, and after this week's home grown horrors, feel ancient.
It was different on the West Coast. My clock radio went off a little after 6 AM for 5 seconds until I hit it. Something about the tone made me wake up and pay attention though. We turned on the TV and went from asleep to at war in about 30 seconds. I was a private pilot and immediately knew the TV announcers ("this must have been an accident") were full of crap. 10 minutes later, the second plane hit. I remember the announcer speculating that there was an air traffic control problem in NYC. They just couldn't conceive of it being intentional.
I've always thought it was weird we weren't better prepared. Tom Clancy put an airliner into the US Capitol in Debt of Honor 7 years earlier. He was the James Patterson of his day, but apparently unread by anyone in authority.
If you want to see how rapidly unity forged in tragedy collapses today look at Oct 7. Israel has a homogenous and broadly shared culture and religion (socially, they are our polar opposite). But within 1 year of the massacre of Oct 7, the unity govt had ended and the "loyal opposition" structure returned. Compare that to WWII in England, where a similar Parliamentary grand-coalition lasted 5 years. Oct 7 was a one-off but the German attacks on London lasted for years. Maybe humans are wired with an evolutionary mechanism to bias us toward more recent or ongoing events over past ones. 9/11 was typical. We got 6-8 months of kumbaya before we went back to trying to destroy each other politically.
The tape of the 3 girls in their apartment is a great one. They lose it for about 40 seconds, screaming madly. Most people behave that way. The question is, how quickly can your frontal lobe reassert control? SpecOps and SWAT guys can do it in milliseconds; we peons take longer. In this case, one of the girls gets there within a minute and declares that she's getting off "the 33rd floor of this building". (This is the proper response.) That shakes the others out of the panic enough to join her. The moral here is that YOU being prepared to respond quickly and rationally can save the lives of many other sheeple. Be the leader who says "I'm getting to safety and I hope y'all join me."
It's still crazy to think that the West Coast literally woke up to that. Meanwhile, the East and Central at least had a few hours of normalcy before it all went to hell.
Re-watching the timeline video, it stuns me to see that the biggest news story of the morning was... wait for it... Michael Jordan's return to the NBA. This is all within living memory, but it's still insane to imagine that the biggest news story of the day had nothing to do with politics. Politics was, in fact, just a part of the landscape, but it didn't dominate it. I hate it when people say things are the same today as they were back then. I get what they're trying to say, but to say things weren't different at all is just dishonest. The news was actually quite boring back then.
As for not being more prepared, I'm honestly not sure what more could've been done, other than implement policies in place today years ahead of time. This would've been a tough sell absent a clear and present danger. I'll say though that listening to the ATCers, the first responders, even the news people, everyone responded professionally and handled the situation as well as anyone could. This despite being taken completely by surprise. It'd been years, if not decades, since a U.S. airliner was hijacked. The lack of panic, being hyper-focused on the job, that's definitely an American trait. I never understood where the idea that Americans are panic-prone came from. Jealousy, maybe?
If 9/11 today, everyone's first impulse would be to blame one another. If you think the Left is insufferable with their hectoring and lectures today, oh boy, you have no idea how much worse it could get...
I was taking a personal safety class recently and the importance of getting people to snap out of "freeze" was emphasized. It's so difficult because the physiological response is so powerful. One way to overcome it, like you said, is to just get moving. Hopefully, it attracts everyone else's attention. Groupthink isn't always bad. It's yet another evolutionary development which allowed us to survive.
On 9/12, I got into the backseat of the taxi of a cabdriver I knew and said, "Well, at least the immigration matter has been settled." I believed it. I took it for granted that the federal government would seriously address an issue which I had known for eight years by then could bring disaster eventually.
I couldn't have imagined that we were governed by fools and knaves. They hadn't told us who they were yet.
A quarter century on, and we have the security state, which metastasized quite easily into the surveillance state. It does make things tougher on would be serial killers, but don't we all have the occasional feeling that we're being watched while we're taking a piss at home?
On the bright side, I will repeat a cliche because I think it's true. Multiculturalism must be killed or America will be killed, but I don't sense this innate mutual hostility between the races which we are told exists and will destroy us. Maybe I've just been lucky in that regard. Several people have done their best to kill me, but they've all been white. On Wednesday afternoon I had the loveliest conversation by phone with a black lady who works in a medical office. My profile photo is mine. I'm distinguished by a virtual lack of melanin. And I have never had any trouble with blacks, browns, you name it.
I'm a Christian, and know that the one thing we are actually commanded to covet is the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Unless The Holy Spirit Christianizes a people there is no hope that their society won't crumble to ruin. But we can still pray.
Thanks Max. Saving this one for the archives.
I was born in the late '90s and as such have no real memories of that day. Like last post I have too many thoughts from Islam to the loss of community and more but I'll stop with two sentiments.
This post made me go down the rabbit hole of Flight 93 and it definitely makes me feel proud to be an American. From Alexander Solzhenitsyn's famous "we didn't love freedom enough," quote to how few victims of the Holocaust did anything to resist (except for the Bielski Partisans) I know the rule of history is most people stand by in the face of evil, but the people on Flight 93.
On the other hand, I do think next year's 25th 9/11 anniversary will be marred by the simple fact that the American people they tried to save and who came together afterwards are now calling for each other's deaths and in some rare cases actually taking steps to bring it about.
I'm almost ashamed I said nothing about United 93. Myself and others lament the fact Americans have so few contemporary heroes to build a national myth around. Well, what are Todd Beamer and the other passengers of 9/11, then? In fact, we don't honor Beamer and the passengers of United 93 enough. Where are their statues? I looked at the number of Beamer memorials and it's pathetic, honestly. I understand his family may prefer that his name not be larger than life, but still. If we're not going to lionize Beamer, if we're not going to build a national mythos out of someone like him, who would we build it out of?
With all due respect to Charlie Kirk, the honor he's receiving is totally out of proportion and quite ridiculous, actually. How many people associated with 9/11 have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
With Kirk I feel like it's the same thing that happened with that Shiloh Hendrix lady (whose name I had to look up); it's not so much about that we love the person as much as we hate the people who went after them. Enemy of my enemy is my friend I guess.
I flew in from San Francisco to NYC, where I lived at the time, the evening of September 10.
September 11 was a rare day off after having traveled, so I was home on the UES rather than at the office down in Chelsea. The phone rang at 9, my friend across the park calling to tell me to turn on the TV as a plane had hit the WTC. We spent the next few hours watching the destruction in real time.
We met up in the park, to have some grasp at normalcy. Thousands of others had the same idea, and we all discovered that Manhattan was locked down, that phones didn't work, that jet fighters patrolled the skies, that ten thousand deaths were expected. As we made our way downtown on foot we saw the MTA buses headed uptown, hundreds of passengers hanging on to roofs and exteriors as if we had somehow transported to Delhi. We smelled the burning, saw the lines hundreds deep at the banks, heard the ambulances racing to sites of death and horror before we saw the thousands of body bags they had staged along the WSH.
The homes of friends and co-workers, destroyed. The deaths of strangers no less abhorrent for their anonymity. I was 35 then, and after this week's home grown horrors, feel ancient.
It was different on the West Coast. My clock radio went off a little after 6 AM for 5 seconds until I hit it. Something about the tone made me wake up and pay attention though. We turned on the TV and went from asleep to at war in about 30 seconds. I was a private pilot and immediately knew the TV announcers ("this must have been an accident") were full of crap. 10 minutes later, the second plane hit. I remember the announcer speculating that there was an air traffic control problem in NYC. They just couldn't conceive of it being intentional.
I've always thought it was weird we weren't better prepared. Tom Clancy put an airliner into the US Capitol in Debt of Honor 7 years earlier. He was the James Patterson of his day, but apparently unread by anyone in authority.
If you want to see how rapidly unity forged in tragedy collapses today look at Oct 7. Israel has a homogenous and broadly shared culture and religion (socially, they are our polar opposite). But within 1 year of the massacre of Oct 7, the unity govt had ended and the "loyal opposition" structure returned. Compare that to WWII in England, where a similar Parliamentary grand-coalition lasted 5 years. Oct 7 was a one-off but the German attacks on London lasted for years. Maybe humans are wired with an evolutionary mechanism to bias us toward more recent or ongoing events over past ones. 9/11 was typical. We got 6-8 months of kumbaya before we went back to trying to destroy each other politically.
The tape of the 3 girls in their apartment is a great one. They lose it for about 40 seconds, screaming madly. Most people behave that way. The question is, how quickly can your frontal lobe reassert control? SpecOps and SWAT guys can do it in milliseconds; we peons take longer. In this case, one of the girls gets there within a minute and declares that she's getting off "the 33rd floor of this building". (This is the proper response.) That shakes the others out of the panic enough to join her. The moral here is that YOU being prepared to respond quickly and rationally can save the lives of many other sheeple. Be the leader who says "I'm getting to safety and I hope y'all join me."
It's still crazy to think that the West Coast literally woke up to that. Meanwhile, the East and Central at least had a few hours of normalcy before it all went to hell.
Re-watching the timeline video, it stuns me to see that the biggest news story of the morning was... wait for it... Michael Jordan's return to the NBA. This is all within living memory, but it's still insane to imagine that the biggest news story of the day had nothing to do with politics. Politics was, in fact, just a part of the landscape, but it didn't dominate it. I hate it when people say things are the same today as they were back then. I get what they're trying to say, but to say things weren't different at all is just dishonest. The news was actually quite boring back then.
As for not being more prepared, I'm honestly not sure what more could've been done, other than implement policies in place today years ahead of time. This would've been a tough sell absent a clear and present danger. I'll say though that listening to the ATCers, the first responders, even the news people, everyone responded professionally and handled the situation as well as anyone could. This despite being taken completely by surprise. It'd been years, if not decades, since a U.S. airliner was hijacked. The lack of panic, being hyper-focused on the job, that's definitely an American trait. I never understood where the idea that Americans are panic-prone came from. Jealousy, maybe?
If 9/11 today, everyone's first impulse would be to blame one another. If you think the Left is insufferable with their hectoring and lectures today, oh boy, you have no idea how much worse it could get...
I was taking a personal safety class recently and the importance of getting people to snap out of "freeze" was emphasized. It's so difficult because the physiological response is so powerful. One way to overcome it, like you said, is to just get moving. Hopefully, it attracts everyone else's attention. Groupthink isn't always bad. It's yet another evolutionary development which allowed us to survive.
On 9/12, I got into the backseat of the taxi of a cabdriver I knew and said, "Well, at least the immigration matter has been settled." I believed it. I took it for granted that the federal government would seriously address an issue which I had known for eight years by then could bring disaster eventually.
I couldn't have imagined that we were governed by fools and knaves. They hadn't told us who they were yet.
A quarter century on, and we have the security state, which metastasized quite easily into the surveillance state. It does make things tougher on would be serial killers, but don't we all have the occasional feeling that we're being watched while we're taking a piss at home?
On the bright side, I will repeat a cliche because I think it's true. Multiculturalism must be killed or America will be killed, but I don't sense this innate mutual hostility between the races which we are told exists and will destroy us. Maybe I've just been lucky in that regard. Several people have done their best to kill me, but they've all been white. On Wednesday afternoon I had the loveliest conversation by phone with a black lady who works in a medical office. My profile photo is mine. I'm distinguished by a virtual lack of melanin. And I have never had any trouble with blacks, browns, you name it.
I'm a Christian, and know that the one thing we are actually commanded to covet is the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Unless The Holy Spirit Christianizes a people there is no hope that their society won't crumble to ruin. But we can still pray.