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I'm kind of surprised to hear people's sympathetic reactions, from outside the USA. I guess I never realized how far reaching those events really were...
I bet many of you don't remember, but on 9/10/11 I believe, the Iraqi military shot down a U.S. drone, and I remember hearing about in on the radio on my way to school. I was talking about it in 1st period chemistry class with my teacher, (I was a high school sophomore,) and she commented that one of the custodians just told her about some plane flying into a building. I didn't think too much of it - after all, this was small talk, and it hadn't made any headlines... Then the principle came over the P.A. system and told us that a plane had flown in to a building in New York. I will admit, I barely knew what the WTC even was.
And then we went to 2nd period, and saw on live T.V, in real time, the plane hit the 2nd tower...
While I don't get emotional, and certainly none of us in that high school classroom were, I do remember feeling this slightly scary feeling of, "WTF is going on, is the world about to end?!" But what was the most shocking to me, was seeing the buildings collapse, and then the ash clouds just totally consume the city. I remember seeing the ash clouds erupting from the buildings, and a wave of people racing to outrun them. There was one clip of someone running inside a storefront, then looking thru the front windows as the ash cloud swept by and turned the place pitch-black. Out of everything that we watched that day, for some reason, that to me was the most chilling. Probably because it was so easy for me to imagine being on the sidewalk trying to outrun some unstoppable force of carnage...
I can't imagine how you New Yorker's felt that day...
Living under the flight lines of Louisville International Airport, which contains probably one of the largest UPS air-hubs in the country, I remember the dis-belief of how quite the skys were that day. A totally surreal, unpleasant reminder of the reality of what had just happened in New York.
God Bless...
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