9/11

[ebonlock]

I didn't mean to, I hadn't intended to put myself through all of this again. I still remember that morning 5 years ago like it was yesterday. I can't even watch the trailers and the commercials for the movies based on the day, but somehow I felt...compelled to watch the real footage from the event. The two French brothers who filmed the events, one from within tower one, and one outside.

I started crying with the footage of the first plane. It was just as horrible, it never stops being horrible, even now. But it was the second plane that hit me like a punch. I lost it, I just lost it. The worst though, dear gods, the worst was the sound of the bodies impacting the ground as people leapt out of the towers.

"Tony man, it was raining bodies."

Jesus...

Fucking gods how anyone could justify this kind of death and destruction...

Seeing what happened inside the tower when it collapsed, and then on the street when the second collapsed was rough, but I was so, so glad that the film continued afterwards and showed the FDNY company returning alive one by one. At least there was that. The rest was the aftermath. I remember so vividly hoping against hope they'd find people in the rubble, hoping it wasn't going to be as bad as it was. Hoping.

The generosity of the people who contributed to the effort, the dedication of the firefighters going back day after day. Gods, the footage from below the building, the stores and subways. The descriptions of the bodies they did find...

To this day I can't look at a skyline of New York without wincing. When I watch a movie with the twin towers shown in it it actually physically hurts. I know Aelf always gives me confused looks when I react like that, until she realizes...

Do you know what just kills me, though? That right before this aired they were covering the fact that so many of these guys, these heroes, and I don't use that word lightly, that so many have been abandoned since that day. Their health has been damaged by the debris and the air and how the hell does our government treat them? As if they were at fault that the EPA declared the air safe.

So, anyway, I'm a bawling wreck and Kage gives me the look that says, "What's wrong with you, mom?" but Pye jumps up on my chest and actually licks away some of my tears. He honestly did just that. I don't know what I'd do without him sometimes.

Comments

[moonlightnrain.livejournal.com]

*hugs* I'm right there with you with the footage in old movies. It especially seems to get me when it's some happy-go-lucky comedy or romance. I wish I hadn't been up early that morning, though. I wish I hadn't gone through the confusion after the first plane, and hadn't seen the second plane coming and felt my stomach drop in horror and seen the bodies dropping long before anyone on CNN mentioned them.... *sigh*

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

I still remember the look on jakejr's face when I woke up that morning and came into the living room. I think she was still on the phone at the time, the place she'd worked before coming out here had its payment office in one of the towers...

[jakejr.livejournal.com]

The call that woke me was pretty brief, mostly my former boss in hysterics, most of which I didn't understand until I turned the tv on, and it was over before you were in the living room. The main office was in the WTC, but on a fairly low floor, and a lot of the people were at a conference, so everyone got out, although I didn't know that for sure at the time. http://jakejr.livejournal.com/62350.html

[elenderel.livejournal.com]

I ... I can't watch the footage. Well, I can watch it all I like through my tears and heavy heart. And the rueful knowledge of what the world has become since that bright, sunny morning five years ago. I can't bear to see pictures of the former skyline - it's a ghost from another time, another New York, another America; it's a punch in the gut for me. After all this time I still have a hard time watching the tapes, watching first one then the other tower collapse into dust upon themselves ... I'm sorry, I'll stop now. I had written more but ... well, I feel like there ought to be a funeral for the America we once knew, is all. Because everything changed on this day five years ago.

There's a remembrance ceremony going on tonight not far from here ... if I'm not a miserable beast when the novocaine wears off I think I'll attend it.

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I'd say that everything changed, but it did bring home to a generation just how naive we'd been about our security and just how hated we really are.

I'd hoped that in the weeks and months after that we'd choose a sane, rational and focused approach to dealing with the aftermath. Sadly, that wasn't to be. Instead of reacting like so many other countries to terrorist attacks, we lashed out stupidly and violently, letting our baser natures prevail.

[windrose.livejournal.com]

{{{HUGS}}}

I remember watching it with you as it happened. I remember the blank, stunned look on L's face as she said in a dazed voice that she was supposed to call someone who worked in the towers that morning. I remember standing frozen behind the couch unable to fully comprehend at first that this level of destruction was a deliberate act. I remember the horror in your voice when you realized that some of the "debris" falling from the towers were people.

I remember. And I will never forget.

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

I don't know what I would've done without you guys that morning. And the three of us huddled together on the futon somehow made it more...bearable.

[windrose.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Where our parents' generation remember where they were when JFK was shot, we remember where we were on 9/11. I was with you, and jakejr in a small apartment in Mountain View, CA. When I see footage of the attacks now, I remember that morning and wish y'all were with me.

[jakejr.livejournal.com]

*hugs* both of you.

[psyfic.livejournal.com]

{{{{hugs}}}}

[ellid.livejournal.com]

I managed to watch part of a documentary on Saturday night, and nothing else. It's too painful. And I was in Massachusetts.

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

I think ultimately that watching that documentary last night helped in a way. To see people surviving that horror, to see them not giving up and losing hope. Seeing the generosity of the people of the city despite the pain and fear. I remember having such hope that we could build a better society in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Sadly that hope didn't last long. I believe it was a few days after that that Bush used the term "crusade" and then "Homeland Security" and I knew with complete certainty that it was all going to hell.

[missjones.livejournal.com]

I was not able to watch the documentary. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I think the pain is still to real and too close. Jim and I had just taken T on a spur of the moment trip to the city for the first time over that labor day weekend. We thought about going to the Twin Towers and taking her up to the observation level, but there wasn't enough time in the day and a half we had to get to it. Now I wish so very badly that we had taken her. Our thought at the time was that there would always be next time to take her. Now there is no next time. Who could have known that a mere week later this horrible thing would have happened and taken those buildings away from the world? I guess you can just never take anything, even a building, for granted.

And no, the skyline isn't the same. And as bad as it is to see the buildings missing in pictures or on TV, it's so much worse to see them missing in reality. We went down last summer and looking from the Empire State Building down to Battery Park and not seeing them there...it was a like a shot to the gut. I could not bring myself to go to Ground Zero. The closest we got was Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty ferry terminal. I couldn't bear looking into the empty sky knowing what had taken place, what was still taking place in the world even after that terrbile loss and pointless destruction and know that we really haven't learned a damned thing from what happened.

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

If you haven't seen it or read it yet you should check out Keith Olbermann's speech from Ground Zero, it's a heartfelt condemnation of an administration that would allow such an atrocity to happen on its watch, and would, five years later, have done nothing to replace the buildings. The man is an absolute god, the Edward R. Murrow of our generation, no question about it.