However, I can also see there being an element of trauma and just not wanting to revisit the footage on purpose. I know I have some pictures I never want to look at again, although nothing on this scale.
People who weren't alive or were otherwise busy that morning don't remember the uncertainty after the first plane. Everyone thought it was an accident.
No one could conceive it was a deliberate strike. Everyone knew terrorists hijacked airplanes to fly to third world countries, not to commit suicide into buildings.
That cognitive dissonance all collapsed in a single instant as the second plane hit. And that's a lot to process all at once. I still can't watch video footage without crying.
If I'd been the videographer, you'd better believe I'd have locked this in my attic and forgotten about it.
Though people were far less concerned about it than now, it's not fair to say it wasn't on their radar at all. The WTC had already been attacked once, and Timothy McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City Bombing only a few months before 9/11.
Even on the day, in that twenty minute window between crashes the general narrative was it might be an attack, just no reason to think it is yet.
Is this a “critical infrastructure” thing?
Watching it happen live with the immediate knowledge that it was obviously a deliberate act was, like you said, a huge amount to process all at once.
I actually think that having a goal like "get dressed and go to work" probably was a great benefit to my mental state.
I turned on the TV to see what was going on, which I usually don’t do. After a couple minutes of “oh my that’s a tragic accident” the second plane hit an I immediately knew it was no accident.
I worked downtown Mpls at the time and no way I was going to work that day. Thankfully my boss told everyone to stay home.
Seeing all of it live is a memory burned into my brain the same as watching the Challenger blow up live in middle school.
I still think back to that day and have some guilt about our initial reaction to the first flight. Given how instantly news propagates today I assumed that back then we knew the details already and just made light of the suffering. I moved to NYC right after college and recall those early years in the city where everyone knew every little detail of the day. Your recollection assuages some of the guilt I harbor from that day.
We watched as the second plane ran right into the tower. At that moment we started realizing that it was intentional. But even then, the uncertainty about who would do that to us and why, was really worse than before.
This event really changed my entire life. Prior to this I had plans to finish my automotive tech trade school program. Within the next few days watching the footage of people leaping to their deaths in preference to burning alive, and as more and more information trickled in about who was responsible for the attack, I decided I needed to join the military to help ensure that nothing like this ever happened again. My life would have played out a whole lot differently if not for this.
I know others have been downvoted for saying this, but for me the shocking nature of it took a while to sink in. I had not had a chance to travel much yet at that point. I had been to New York City once, just like I had been to Europe once and seen London and Paris and Rome. I came from a small town in Texas and had a habit of thinking of all of those places as the "real world" where big real things happened, places that had diplomats and stock exchanges and famous universities and celebrities and, well, terrorist attacks. The 9/11 attacks didn't violate that sense of order. On a gut, emotional level, it was just a real world type thing happening in a real world type place. It took me a while to understand why people were reacting so differently.
* There was nothing beautiful about the attack, obviously, but the day itself was a perfect late summer New York day with a totally cloudless sky. So you'd look in one direction and see smoke and devastation, you'd face the other direction and see nothing but pure crystalline blue skies. It was quite surreal.
It’s also surprisingly good quality too. I really was surprised at the zoom and focus on early into it. Gives me a distinct impression it was shot on what was probably quite a good portable video camera for the period.
Plenty of children and sibling’s children around to find this and convince to post it
Much like photos the U.S. soldiers took in Europe while liberating the death camps. Most of them just went into their attics until they died and their kids were cleaning out their stuff.
Whereas you all got yanked into this different awful reality that happens out of nowhere watching this extreme insane next level thing happen on live TV, it’s quite a different thing to growing up with a low level sense that it is normal that someone might want to do something bad to you purely because you live in a particular place in a particular country. I think thats what I was getting at; that my life experience would have meant that when the second one hit it was a feeling of resignation and deep sadness, because I was used to the idea that terror attacks happen. But coming literally out of the blue for you guys it must have been a different emotion, truly shocking especially given how extreme these attacks were and how they played out in full view of everyone instead of in grimy tunnels and smokey pubs like all the stuff that happened when I was a child. Because it was such a shock for Americans I was pretty scared about how you were going to react, I remember seriously discussing with friends wether we thought you would use nukes or if we were all going to end up conscripted to fight with you in some huge war to exact revenge on whoever had done it seems far fetched now but there have definitely been serious global consequences.
This whole Ukraine thing has really reminded me of the nuclear war nightmares I used to have in the 80’s as well. I feel an impending sense of doom about this also. I hope I’m wrong.
Terrorism wasn't a new experience to us New Yorkers - we had experienced the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.[1] That truck bomb under the building didn't succeed in taking down the towers, but it caused major damage and disruption, killed six people and injured over a thousand.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...