9/11 : Share experiences, tributes, feelings, rants...
Today around the world is Sep 11 2006, the 5th anniversary. Let's share tributes, experiences, feelings, rants.
I hope this is not a duplicate thread, it's meant to discuss different things from
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=66456
" The world since 9-11 2001... This thread is a place to discuss your thoughts about the state of the world since the events of 9/11 2001."
5 years ago I was living in a small apartment in San Francisco. I was working as a web designer in a company in a business park near the San Francisco International Airport, a half hour drive from my apartment (1.5hours by public transport..!).
In the morning I got woken up by I think my brother in Australia that called first. He was like "Do you know what's going on?". I was like, huh? Then my parents called. They were able to get through on my cell phone initially. I turned on the TV and one of the towers was smoking. Stuck to the TV, I watched as moments later the 2nd plane slammed in, then not long after the towers collapsed. I was like as most others OMFG.
I still logged in to my work server from home and actually spoke to a colleague that was already at work, we were trying to discuss a website, then we were like, fuck this work stuff, what the fuck is going on. Next day there was quite a furore as people tried to get to grips with things. Given it's West Coast so it was not as direct an experience but still shocking.
In mid-October 2001 I made my long-previously planned trip to New York and Boston. Cruising around New York was intense, but according to my friends in San Fran the normal New Yorker "hard edge" was softened somewhat by what happened. I made a quick pass around GroundZero one day, I couldn't bear to stay too long, there was just a massive feeling of death and loss in the air. Not something scary, but a real... ugly... sort of feeling.
Boston was full of flags like New York, and I was really amazed by the sense of strength of the American people. Ironically the thing that makes people think Americans are annoying and overbearing, but actually it is a sense of strength that sometimes people don't understand, and also sometimes not "moderated" by Americans travelling overseas.
November 2001 there were layoffs at my company. I survived, and can you believe it from June 2001 to Dec 2001 they were trying to get my work visa sorted out. This was before the Dept of Immigration was merged into Homeland Security.
In 2002 towards the middle of the year, the US economy was totally fuxx0red. People were losing jobs and moving out of San Francisco in droves, Sep 11 was the finishing blow to the punch-in-the-gut that was the dot com bust. In 2002 there started being news circulating of random attacks on Arabs, blacks and just anyone brown-skin. Even in the SF Bay Area. Towards the end of 2002 I got increasingly worried about my job, and the oncoming Iraq War that seemed like just needless asking for more shit to happen.
In July 2000 in my company we had a department of 8 web designers including 1 web manager. By December 2002 in my company I was the last web designer standing, the rest had been laid off, transferred to another dept, or quit.
I quit my US job in Jan 2003 and walked away from a 5-year work visa and a salary of $60,000 USD. I moved to Sydney and got a job with Greenpeace in March, worked for a year. There were interesting anti-war protests I was involved in. Greenpeace Australia organised an action where they placed a banner on a warship leaving Sydney harbour, alongside a flotilla of kayaks and they placed a symbolic rope across the path of the warship. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...567651003.html
In March 2003 I started doing freelance work, and eventually in November I had to leave to go back and live with my parents due to bipolar disorder.
It's funny how the world still goes on despite all the madness in the world. There's a new age book that predicts there will be a nuclear terrorist attack this century. It's a scary possibility, dirty bomb and all that.
My condolences to all those affected by Sep 11, directly, indirectly, in any way. Clearly Islamic extremists are something we will have to deal with for the next 20 years or more. Just as the IRA-protestant terror eventually faded away, maybe we as a people will move on to, with the Middle East "sorting itself out" over the next quarter of the decade.
You know, I think this next level of humanity would be necessary to achieve, before our major progress in Physics - which I predict will come full on from 2020 - 2050 : where we will have massive abilities to harness power and matter. By this time, hopefully we would have evolved enough to handle all this responsibly otherwise we'd just fuck the Earth BIG TIME, possibly killing a lot of ourselves, or all of ourselves. In which case, see y'all on the flipside of this existence.
Take care, and as we let this date pass, let us look forward to more relevant, less-suffering type things in the future. Like Steve Job's announcement on Sep 12. Peace.
I hope this is not a duplicate thread, it's meant to discuss different things from
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=66456
" The world since 9-11 2001... This thread is a place to discuss your thoughts about the state of the world since the events of 9/11 2001."
5 years ago I was living in a small apartment in San Francisco. I was working as a web designer in a company in a business park near the San Francisco International Airport, a half hour drive from my apartment (1.5hours by public transport..!).
In the morning I got woken up by I think my brother in Australia that called first. He was like "Do you know what's going on?". I was like, huh? Then my parents called. They were able to get through on my cell phone initially. I turned on the TV and one of the towers was smoking. Stuck to the TV, I watched as moments later the 2nd plane slammed in, then not long after the towers collapsed. I was like as most others OMFG.
I still logged in to my work server from home and actually spoke to a colleague that was already at work, we were trying to discuss a website, then we were like, fuck this work stuff, what the fuck is going on. Next day there was quite a furore as people tried to get to grips with things. Given it's West Coast so it was not as direct an experience but still shocking.
In mid-October 2001 I made my long-previously planned trip to New York and Boston. Cruising around New York was intense, but according to my friends in San Fran the normal New Yorker "hard edge" was softened somewhat by what happened. I made a quick pass around GroundZero one day, I couldn't bear to stay too long, there was just a massive feeling of death and loss in the air. Not something scary, but a real... ugly... sort of feeling.
Boston was full of flags like New York, and I was really amazed by the sense of strength of the American people. Ironically the thing that makes people think Americans are annoying and overbearing, but actually it is a sense of strength that sometimes people don't understand, and also sometimes not "moderated" by Americans travelling overseas.
November 2001 there were layoffs at my company. I survived, and can you believe it from June 2001 to Dec 2001 they were trying to get my work visa sorted out. This was before the Dept of Immigration was merged into Homeland Security.
In 2002 towards the middle of the year, the US economy was totally fuxx0red. People were losing jobs and moving out of San Francisco in droves, Sep 11 was the finishing blow to the punch-in-the-gut that was the dot com bust. In 2002 there started being news circulating of random attacks on Arabs, blacks and just anyone brown-skin. Even in the SF Bay Area. Towards the end of 2002 I got increasingly worried about my job, and the oncoming Iraq War that seemed like just needless asking for more shit to happen.
In July 2000 in my company we had a department of 8 web designers including 1 web manager. By December 2002 in my company I was the last web designer standing, the rest had been laid off, transferred to another dept, or quit.
I quit my US job in Jan 2003 and walked away from a 5-year work visa and a salary of $60,000 USD. I moved to Sydney and got a job with Greenpeace in March, worked for a year. There were interesting anti-war protests I was involved in. Greenpeace Australia organised an action where they placed a banner on a warship leaving Sydney harbour, alongside a flotilla of kayaks and they placed a symbolic rope across the path of the warship. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...567651003.html
In March 2003 I started doing freelance work, and eventually in November I had to leave to go back and live with my parents due to bipolar disorder.
It's funny how the world still goes on despite all the madness in the world. There's a new age book that predicts there will be a nuclear terrorist attack this century. It's a scary possibility, dirty bomb and all that.
My condolences to all those affected by Sep 11, directly, indirectly, in any way. Clearly Islamic extremists are something we will have to deal with for the next 20 years or more. Just as the IRA-protestant terror eventually faded away, maybe we as a people will move on to, with the Middle East "sorting itself out" over the next quarter of the decade.
You know, I think this next level of humanity would be necessary to achieve, before our major progress in Physics - which I predict will come full on from 2020 - 2050 : where we will have massive abilities to harness power and matter. By this time, hopefully we would have evolved enough to handle all this responsibly otherwise we'd just fuck the Earth BIG TIME, possibly killing a lot of ourselves, or all of ourselves. In which case, see y'all on the flipside of this existence.
Take care, and as we let this date pass, let us look forward to more relevant, less-suffering type things in the future. Like Steve Job's announcement on Sep 12. Peace.
Comments
It was evening over there, and the first I heard of it were e-mails from my wife and my brother in law saying that a plane had hit one of the towers. Later I got another e-mail saying that another plane had hit and that it was a deliberate attack. I told others, but many of them thought I was pulling their leg, until other people started getting the same e-mails. My ship did have an internet connection via satellite, but the connection was low speed at best and it quickly got swamped by people trying to log on and see what was going on, so we didn't have much more than rumors at first.
Later on the C.O. came on the announcing system saying that the WTC, Pentagon and the Capitol Building (early rumor) had been hit, etc. I remember him saying that US forces worldwide were at DEFCON 3, 'the highest he'd seen it' in a 25 year Navy career. We didn't go to battle stations, since we were already at a high defensive posture due to being in the Arabian (Persian) Gulf in the first place. We were one of only 4 combat ships (3 US and one Australian) in the Gulf right then because the Enterprise battle-group had left a few days prior to head home around Cape Horn, and they were off of Ethiopia. Back then it was not unheard of to gap carrier groups since the threat there was not considered to be high.
So the C.O. came on again later saying that the Air Force was sending out F-15's from Saudi to give us cover for a few days until the Enterprise group could turn around and get back. The next morning we heard from the combat systems people that the 'Big E' had all 8 reactors at full power, and had left her battle-group behind racing back to the Gulf.
After that, things went back to the routine of MIO for a few weeks, but everyone was hoping we'd get a chance to 'get back' before we were due to go home (December). We all assumed the investigation would take weeks if not months, but 'fortunately' the hijackers left a clear trail that even a blind FBI agent could follow, and come October we were out in the Gulf of Oman escorting the Enterprise during the first part of Enduring Freedom. My ship contributed by launching a pair of Tomahawks into Afghanistan. Since making a port call in that region was out of the question after 9/11, we ended up spending 80 consecutive days at sea (my personal record) until we pulled into Suda Bay, Crete on our way home. We arrived home as scheduled just before Christmas 2001.
... but 'fortunately' the hijackers left a clear trail that even a blind FBI agent could follow ....
Like finding a perfectly preserved passport from one of the planes that were obliterated with burning jet fuel so hot three buildings collapsed perfectly into a neat pile for easy clean-up.
As for 11-sep-01, I was asleep. I think it was the week before classes started at college and I was getting as much sleep as I could, while I could. I didn't really care to watch the news all day. The planes hit the towers, the towers fell, it was done by Islamist terrorists: what more do you need to know? I do remember, several months later, being upset that we didn't strike back hard enough. We're dealing with a force that doesn't seem to respect our culture or diplomacy, and anything short of how we dealt with Japan in WWII isn't going to cut it. (I'm not saying nuclear per-se, but remember that the fire bombing of Tokyo was more devastating than either atomic blast).
And strangely enough, Japan is now a good friend. Diplomats clearly don't read history.
This USS Nicholson?
That's her! 8)
That's her! 8)
That's really amazing. I just wanted to see what kind of ship it was and found this whole thing about it. Do you have any mixed feelings about her being decommissioned and sunk?
It's funny how 9/11 is this generation's Pearl Harbor/JFK Assassination. Everyone knows exactly what they were doing at the time.
As for me, I was a senior in high school, and for some odd reason, that morning I decided to wake up early. I walked out to the living room, only to see my old man watching the news as he always does. The first plane had already hit, but moments later I actually saw the second plane hit on live television. That day was surreal. I remember going to school and seeing teachers and other classmates crying. Even though I was 3,000 miles away, we still felt the horror and fear as if we were in New York.
Damn, now I got myself all down again...Oh well.
That's really amazing. I just wanted to see what kind of ship it was and found this whole thing about it. Do you have any mixed feelings about her being decommissioned and sunk?
I was disappointed to see her sunk as a target, but all ships, military or civilian end up with one of three fates:
1 - Preserved as a museum ship.
2 - Cut up for scrap.
3 - Sunk, either accidental/war/or as a target.
Many Navy sailors think a warship being sunk as a target is more 'honorable' than getting cut up in any case. It is actually getting to be quite common in the last several years, they are trying to clear out the backlog of old ships stored around the country, and the least expensive way is to sink them as targets. The scrap metal market is already flooded beyond the capability of shipyards to keep up with the backlog of ships.
What really surprised me was seeing my first ship, the USS Acadia (AD-42) in some scenes in Pearl Harbor! The last time I checked, she was still under 'mothballs' in the West Loch in Pearl Harbor. In the movie she is the large ship near the 3 or 4 mothballed DD's that get blown up a bunch of times over. 8)
Off the topic, did anyone catch that HBO special "In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/2001"? Very powerful. I went through a lot of emotions watching it. If anyone hasn't seen it, I suggest giving it a try.
That is an excellent film, we have it on DVD!
It's funny how 9/11 is this generation's Pearl Harbor/JFK Assassination. Everyone knows exactly what they were doing at the time.
//starts a "Where were you when Regan was shot" topic for the other old-timers....