Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

9/11 was my birthday, and I was just outside of NYC in school that day.

I was in math class. The phone in the classroom rang and my teacher turned on the radio (1010 WINS) immediately. After hearing what had happened she broke down in tears because her husband worked in WTC. My parents worked in NYC (as did most of my classmates' parents) and was very concerned.

The school district evacuated the elementary schools to the gym at the middle school because our town had a major dam and there were concerns that could be attacked too, which would've flooded the low-lying areas where the elementary schools are. Eventually, school was dismissed and I ended up at my neighbor's house. Her husband was a FDNY Captain.

So many people I know died or were permanently harmed (physically or mentally) that day.

While nearly every second of that day is permanently etched into my brain, there's one day that's even more vivid. My FDNY Captain neighbor took me to ground zero in early November 2001. I'll never, ever forget the smell of burning flesh and the hundreds of firefighters using rakes looking for human remains. He told me to never forget, and I never will.

Thanks for writing this. It is good to hear the experience of someone that was close by. I live clear on the other side of the country (and did on 9/11 too). I didn’t know anyone that died that day, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never met anyone who lost someone that day either. So it is good for those of you who did experience it to write about it since it is so easy for people like me to be no more affected by it than any other historic event that is far removed.

It's weird. I lived in LA at the time and I was in my early 20s. I remember my gf waking me up at 6:30am to go look at the TV. It doesn't feel like an historical or far-away event to me. It seems like the most pivotal moment of my life, when this country changed and everything changed. We were worried about LA being attacked, worried about bio/chem attacks. Suddenly there were no-fly lists, and things called TSA and Homeland Security. Domestic mass surveillance really started then ... it's when all the methods from the drug wars were brought onto American soil. Suddenly there were truther conspiracy theories on a fairly new site called YouTube. Suddenly psychopaths on local Texas radio made their way into the national conversation. And a year or so later I found myself kettled by cops at a protest against our invasion of Iraq. I posted a novel on my website that got a lot of hits from military IP addresses in Virginia and Iraq. A neighbor told me the police were going through my trash while I was at work. My apartment got broken into and only a laptop and my papers stolen. I left the US and lived abroad for 10 years.

When I think of Americans who were alive then and younger, or who weren't born, looking at it as a historical event, it boggles my mind. Everything about this country has been deformed and twisted, every aspect of the society you live in from security theater at the airport to the militarization of local police, all that hardware, to the way the giant internet sites function now (or don't), to all the conspiracy-fueled madness that led to 1/6/21, which is the only other day that began to feel like 9/11. All of it started that day, it's the moment when we entered the wrong alternate universe.

> to all the conspiracy-fueled madness that led to 1/6/21, which is the only other day that began to feel like 9/11.

THAT is an interesting, and wildly speculative, take.

I don't know what the other trajectory would have been, i.e. had 9/11 been foiled. But I do think it served as the ultimate excuse to curtail rights and freedoms. The long wars it led to both warped our society at home and led to two generations of militarization of kids. For instance, I remember how disgusted and shocked I was at the explosion of military displays at baseball and football games. This was all basically fascism using the attack on our free society to embed xenophobic militarism into every aspect of daily life.

It's speculative, yea. But without 9/11 I don't think we'd have a culture of giant military style pickup trucks rolling coal and waving flags (American or Confederate). I think the militia movement of the 90s would have stayed much more contained and minor without something to justify their claims of conspiracy and NWO takeover. And I think we wouldn't have developed the sense that we were all living in a disaster movie, and become so callous and inured to what we see on the news. I don't think I can or should summarize all this in a post, but maybe the best way to put it would be that it ended the American Century, and bent the arc of our civilization towards decay and self destruction. It exposed a crack in the foundation of the country that has grown, and keeps growing. I suppose that could have happened any number of ways.

The Daily from the NYT had an episode a few days ago precisely on this idea. Very interesting.

So not totally far fetched I'd say.

[1] https://pca.st/episode/6deccd04-ca45-404b-8537-c4bbe73fedb9

Interesting. I have to check this out. The description clocks to me as making perfect sense. I usually find that podcast insultingly reductive, hypersensitive and whiny, but put me in a room with anyone who remembers the Bush administration and I guess I'm still a liberal yet. The premise at least is solidly grounded in the effect I've witnessed. Thanks.

PBS Frontline had documentary outlining this exact path. Would recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5iBxva_pm8

Oh yeah I forgot about all the confusion on what else would be attacked!

People should talk about that more. Every single piece of infrastructure in the whole country was on people’s minds and locked down!

Is there a documentary about that? There is so much possibility for an “isolation thriller” where people’s concerns in their small towns are more the focus than the outcome of what happened by the time the dust settled.

You get a sense of that feeling, from watching the various tv stations on this thread. I had the radio on too, and you get a real sense of the total confusion of that day.

I recall a big anthrax scare in the weeks following. Lots of people were sending white powder to official addresses.

> Lots of people were sending white powder to official addresses.

It turned out that anthrax came from a government lab, and was supposedly sent by a single rogue employee... though doubts linger.

There were some hoaxes and bogus scares too though of course. One of my classmates almost got suspended for having foot powder in his gym bag.. thankfully cooler heads prevailed when school officials realized the kid had athletes foot and thought to doubt how a teenage boy could have plausibly procured weaponized anthrax spores in the first place. But yes, the hysteria was palpable.

and the DC Sniper! if you were in that area

Man that time period must have been so much harder for adults than the teenagers at the time

Even outside the US - there was some of this.

I was in Brighton Conference Centre (Uk) where Tony Blair was due to give a very heavily trailed speech.

After Tower one got hit we all went out of the main auditorium - I then realized I had stupidly left my bag unattended and had to go back and retrieve it.

After tower two got hit a lot of us started to think what if they have a plane targeting Tony and this building - though its a grim thing to say the RAF QRA where armed

>He told me to never forget, and I never will.

Genuinely curious: How do you think these experiences have influenced you and your outlook on world?

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