Quote:
Originally Posted by AOII_LB93
I was getting ready for my 2nd day of work as a high school teacher that day, when I turned on my cell phone and listened to a message from my mom. She said that a plane flew into the WTC. I was a little shocked and told the husband (then BF) to turn on the TV that a plane flew into the WTC. We saw the 2nd one hit. Both of us just stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to think because not a month earlier he had been working on the 60-something-th floor for Morgan Stanley. Seeing the footage of the towers collapse made me sob as I had been there several times. Two of his co-workers were there doing their training. One of the guys potato-sacked a woman who froze in the stair well and carried her down 30 flights of stairs. They made it out, and rented a car to drive back to CA. They only stopped for gas and took turns driving.
How has it changed me? I realized that this country can be attacked, which wasn't something I really had ever thought about before. To me that is the moment my generation will always remember - Where were you when you found out kind of thing. I think we were one of the few generations who didn't have one of those until 9/11. My mom's generation had Kennedy's assassination, the moon landing etc...as well as others, but this just blew me away. I actually have pictures of the skyline in July of '01 from the Statue of Liberty. So sad.
A lot of my family in NY's friends lost members that day.
Never forget.
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Did you all have school that day? How did you all handle it?
I can remember the principal made an announcement, and as he came on, we all expected it to be a rah, rah, good luck to the athletic teams kind of thing, but then, it was to inform us of what had happened. For whatever reasons, ours was one of the schools that kind of decided to limited access to news that day. We were advised not to have the TVs on with students in the room and that, coupled with the internet being at a crawl, fostered crazy rumors of things being even worse than they really were.
When I talked to other people who could watch the news all day, I got the impression that actual news coverage as the events unfolded wasn't much more reliable than the rumors running through the school. In hindsight, I'm kind of grateful that I didn't watch the planes hitting the towers or, more likely that day, the towers falling in a perpetual loop all day. There was a TV documentary with a lot of 9/11 footage recently (nothing "truther-y, just news), and I had to turn it off. Too much fear, sorrow and pain came back. Remember the missing fliers that people put up looking for their loved ones?
When we observed the anniversary a couple of years later, kids were talking about where they were, and it was kind of strange when one of my students could remember every detail of that class period. It made me glad that I hadn't completely lost my stuff and openly wept at my desk or anything, not just for his memories, of course, but because the relative normalcy was comforting to him, I think.
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