I just woke up, realized it was 9/11 and the tears started flowing. What’s happening to our country now and what happened then for this boomer is debilitating 😢😢
Thank You Steven.. It's a wonderful piece. I am a New Yorker .. I love my city . I spend most of my time now in Florida. I still cry at what happened. I worked at Harlem Hospital at the time. I remember being able to see the plumes of smoke rising from way down there. I stayed at the hospital waiting for directives after my day was over, none came. Every one had died.
We used to park our car at the hospital because it wasn't expensive. My husband called me and said honey take the car don't take the train. As I drove down to the upper westside it was eerily quiet... army truck after army truck passed me on the road. It was mind numbing. My city had been attacked .. I remember how quiet the city was for days after.
You went on to describe what happened because of Bush, Chaney. Enraging ..I remember Bush allowed the Saudi's related to Osama Bin Laden to leave the US .. Seventeen of those terrorists were Saudi's who trained in Afghanistan .. I still have my button that says no war on Iraq .. I protested. I can remember we were herded like cattle by police on horseback .
It is shocking that things are worse now. We have a Hitler in the WH .. Our rights and freedoms are being taken away daily . No one is stepping up to save our democracy. The one thing we have are people like you writing newsletters telling the truth about what is happening. I want to see the dems step up and do something ..please ! lost in america.
I had just returned to the US from living and working for nearly two decades in Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia. My mom was in her late 80's so I voluneered to help her. My children were all grown and living in Arizona, but my mom was in Los Altos, California. My daughter Jennifer called me early morning on 9/11 and said "are you watching TV?" I said no and turned it on to watch the horror unfolding after the first plane hit the Tower and the second one was on it's way.
Six months earlier, I flew from Turkmenistan to Kazahstan and was driving from the airport in Alma Aty when I saw a poster on a telephone poll. I asked the driver to stop and I retrieved the poster. It was a picture of an angry George Bush pointing a finger and saying in Russian "If you do not believe in our democracy, we will fly to your country next." I felt numb as I stared at this poster and later learned it was created by Al Qaeda. This was six months before 9/11. A copy of this poster is included in my new book called "Survival."
Twenty four years later, I am still trying to understand the level of hatred required to plan 9/11 for years and years before realizing this horrorific catastrophe. Is it any different than the hatred felt today across the U.S. and generated by Mr. Trump to instill fear? To quote Foreign Affairs, "Like an ordorless gas, hatred and inequality pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of its democracy." The human hatred that caused 9/11, and caused World War II, and killed Charlie Kirk yesterday, is a spreading malignancy. It has metastasized. When Trump stood up at an election rally and said "There will be bloodshed if I do not win," it was a clear and present danger to all Americans. Trump told the Jan. 6th protestors to "fight like hell"; pressured Vice President Mike Pence to break the law and overturn the election results; repeated false claims of election fraud, and urged the crowd to march to the U.S. Capitol - he was inciting a riot to overturn our government.
Until all of us in the US stop spreading the cancer known as "hatred" then it will continue to grow and spread from generation to generation until it kills our democracy. What were the lessons of 9/11?
Thanks Elizabeth ..And Trump made fun of Paul Pelosi at his rallies.. there has been no moment of silence for the couples in Minnesota.. I do think that Trumps side of the asile needs to stop the hate a lot more then the dems. Yesterday was a tragedy. This is terrible but I am afraid of how Trump will use this to hurt us in even more evil ways.
The anger and hatred is intentionally being manufactured and stoked by the right to separate us.
Part of the dialogue is to tell their base that Dems hate them, and we do not, to make it seem like a 2 sided conflict and to stoke feelings of resentment.
If you listen, GOP speeches are always about how the Dems look down on them and/or hate them and on and on, to create an us vs them mentality.
Even Hillary's speech was taken out of context, and she never even said all Trump supporters were racists or deplorable, in fact, quite the opposite, since she made it clear that was NOT what she believed in the speech, but all of that was left out by the right because without that, it was the perfect narrative they were searching for to create an us vs them for their base.
In reality, is not a “both sides are doing it issue” in fanning hate. Sure, many on the left are frustrated that so many are being sucked in by propaganda on the right, but that feeling, at least for me, is not hate but genuine concern.
We are so diminished as a Nation!. I live on a street of row homes, bus stops, apartment buildings. I look on this area as my living room, passers-by as guests, and I clean it every day. "A Street is a Room, by agreement." ( F.P. Soleri). I'm trying to foster peace through hospitality.
Thank you Steven for a very poignant piece. That day I had been watching GMA and they came on with a report that a small plane or helicopter may have crashed into the first tower. After a few minutes of watching I had called my husband at work for something else, still had the TV on and was telling him what I was seeing when I saw the second plane hit. I told my husband I was afraid we were under attack. I was shocked, horrified, and completely numb. My heart was breaking for all those people, our country. Then the Pentagon, Pennsylvania, both towers collapsing, the fear of what was next. But I was so proud of our country for coming together in love and togetherness, unfortunately it didn’t last long. Now we are so far from that unity. I hope and pray we can get it back.
9/11 seems so very long ago, yet at the same time, the events occurring now almost seem more dangerous to Americans. To have a felon in the People’s House, and Republicans who are so afraid to lose their jobs that they bow and kowtow to him is disgraceful. Empathy and compassion are looked upon as negative, while guns are almost worshiped, it is so difficult to watch. When they become victims of their own rhetoric, the rest of us will pay the price of their ignorance with our cities being invaded by our own government.
I know we will get through this terrible regime, but they are determined to destroy everything the sane people among us hold dear.
Very briefly, beyond thoughts about the attack and why, on the Day, as a public health physician I thought that for the safety of the rescue workers in a very dusty, presumably toxic, work environment, they should all be told to wear masks, and that masks should be provided as quickly as possibly. I remember the rage I felt when I heard that both Rudy Giuliani and Christy Todd Whitman, then head of the EPA, announced that masks were not necessary. Many people have had life-long health problems, and died, as a result of that decision and subsequent announcement.
Pangs of guilt? I don't know about Whitman, but Rudy, surely not. For if he felt pangs of guilt about that one, he would also have to have had them about his decision in the 1990s not to join the Fire and Police Depts.' radio systems, so that Fire Fighters were rushing into the building at the same time that Police were rushing out because they had been warned on the imminent collapse, a warning that did not reach the Fire Fighters, resulting in many unnecessary deaths among them. Of course, in general Rudy does not strike one as "guilt-feelings" kind of guy.
I don’t believe that anyone old enough who witnessed the carnage of TV will ever be able to forget the events of that day. There are times in our history that have been captured on TV that will forever move us, change us and force us to ask why?
I, as well, got a call. My dad said turn on the TV. I had just dropped my son off at pre-school and had just arrived back home. I went right back and got him. None of us knew what to think, and we stayed in shock for quite some time glued to the screen for more info, but in reality, no amount of facts or info can ever cure that feeling or ever provide enough explanation to undo that realization that we can be caught off guard and that things can change so dramatically in an instant and we will never feel as safe as we once did. We assumed we were not vulnerable and took it for granted including those in charge of our national security.
Russia's war in Ukraine is showing us that there is a whole new kind of warfare, out there, drone warfare, that we and our allies are not yet as equipped for as we likely should be. This will require revamping our capabilities, as well, including defense, and strategy, and equipment and we need to be in the capable hands of those who realize things have changed and not those who always seem to be looking to the past. An ocean separacting us is no longer serving as protection and one not need a balistic missile to reach us. We could learn a lot if we helped Ukraine more as the drone flyover into Poland's airspace was clearly a test, in my view.
Now we clearly will not be the first target beyond Ukraine, so we need to take this opportunity to prepare and modernize and we need to make it clear now, that will will not tolerate such aggression.
24 years ago, about this time in the morning I turned on the TV to see what I thought was a movie trailer and thought that was pretty graphic…got a call from the office to turn on the TV. Saw the Pentagon had been hit thinking that only a year before I would have been commuting on the train across the bridge running aside the 14th street bridge. Thought about how that would have scared anybody with a brain or conscience. At that moment I understood how my grandparents felt on December 7, 1941, or anybody felt on November 22, 1963 (exactly 4 years before I was born). The shock, horror, and raging anger was palpable. I knew the world had changed and not for the better. As a lapsed historian I knew what was coming next in the broader sense. I also understood the forces leading up to this. It has been worse than I feared. The real damage takes time to set in. As a nation we now have reaped the whirlwind of that momentous change.
I was on one of the first flights out of the country when aircraft were allowed to fly again. To South Africa. Everybody looked at each other with suspicion and a readiness to take down anybody who would dare do anything to us or that aircraft. Nobody slept on that 15+ hour flight from ATL to Cape Town.
How quickly the US went from being considered in a sympathetic light to being reviled in such a short time around the world be it Southern Africa or Latin America and the Caribbean where is did a lot of work as the US became of bully and started down the path of a police state.
With your attuned words my heart once again wrenched from the memory of that day and subsequent days.
I arrived at working about 6:10am Denver. I was employed at a network operations center and we had huge huge television screens spanning an entire wall with various news broadcasts and a screen depicting our country with working lights at each networking station. Just before reaching my desk the first plane collided with the first tower. The business and sounds stopped as everyone faced the screens to view the unbelievable scene.
My daughter was studying at the Manhattan School of Music and even with various direct access lines of course I couldn’t reach her. I think she was about 100 blocks north of the horror.
My organization had many subsidiary locations and risk management procedures in place. There were mirrored back up systems.
Security ordered evacuations of our 3 multistory Denver locations but my organization volunteered to stay. We were each given the choice to leave or stay.
We wept
Amazingly our network operation center in New York City survived but communication were rendered useless. As I recall we eventually were able to reroute some successfully
At 3pm my daughter called. ❤️
Most of my family resided in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and 2 worked at the towers.
All were safe.❤️
An attorney friend whose firm was on the upper floors was at a different location that day.❤️
It still is haunting to consider the motivation for such attacks as these, well, and for wars where we engage in killing our own species.
On 9/11 it was an avowed enemy attempting to destroy America and Americans…today it’s the elected American president aka Terrorist attempting the same hideous crime! We exterminated the first attack’s mastermind…isn’t it long past time to bring the second attack’s mastermind(s) to Justice????
I just woke up, realized it was 9/11 and the tears started flowing. What’s happening to our country now and what happened then for this boomer is debilitating 😢😢
I know.
Thank You Steven.. It's a wonderful piece. I am a New Yorker .. I love my city . I spend most of my time now in Florida. I still cry at what happened. I worked at Harlem Hospital at the time. I remember being able to see the plumes of smoke rising from way down there. I stayed at the hospital waiting for directives after my day was over, none came. Every one had died.
We used to park our car at the hospital because it wasn't expensive. My husband called me and said honey take the car don't take the train. As I drove down to the upper westside it was eerily quiet... army truck after army truck passed me on the road. It was mind numbing. My city had been attacked .. I remember how quiet the city was for days after.
You went on to describe what happened because of Bush, Chaney. Enraging ..I remember Bush allowed the Saudi's related to Osama Bin Laden to leave the US .. Seventeen of those terrorists were Saudi's who trained in Afghanistan .. I still have my button that says no war on Iraq .. I protested. I can remember we were herded like cattle by police on horseback .
It is shocking that things are worse now. We have a Hitler in the WH .. Our rights and freedoms are being taken away daily . No one is stepping up to save our democracy. The one thing we have are people like you writing newsletters telling the truth about what is happening. I want to see the dems step up and do something ..please ! lost in america.
I never got over the anger of knowing Saudi’s were allowed to sneak away with the aid of Bush.
Me too !
Thank you Steven, for this memory on this tragic day in our country. I fear we have taken a terrible path since that day.
I had just returned to the US from living and working for nearly two decades in Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia. My mom was in her late 80's so I voluneered to help her. My children were all grown and living in Arizona, but my mom was in Los Altos, California. My daughter Jennifer called me early morning on 9/11 and said "are you watching TV?" I said no and turned it on to watch the horror unfolding after the first plane hit the Tower and the second one was on it's way.
Six months earlier, I flew from Turkmenistan to Kazahstan and was driving from the airport in Alma Aty when I saw a poster on a telephone poll. I asked the driver to stop and I retrieved the poster. It was a picture of an angry George Bush pointing a finger and saying in Russian "If you do not believe in our democracy, we will fly to your country next." I felt numb as I stared at this poster and later learned it was created by Al Qaeda. This was six months before 9/11. A copy of this poster is included in my new book called "Survival."
Twenty four years later, I am still trying to understand the level of hatred required to plan 9/11 for years and years before realizing this horrorific catastrophe. Is it any different than the hatred felt today across the U.S. and generated by Mr. Trump to instill fear? To quote Foreign Affairs, "Like an ordorless gas, hatred and inequality pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of its democracy." The human hatred that caused 9/11, and caused World War II, and killed Charlie Kirk yesterday, is a spreading malignancy. It has metastasized. When Trump stood up at an election rally and said "There will be bloodshed if I do not win," it was a clear and present danger to all Americans. Trump told the Jan. 6th protestors to "fight like hell"; pressured Vice President Mike Pence to break the law and overturn the election results; repeated false claims of election fraud, and urged the crowd to march to the U.S. Capitol - he was inciting a riot to overturn our government.
Until all of us in the US stop spreading the cancer known as "hatred" then it will continue to grow and spread from generation to generation until it kills our democracy. What were the lessons of 9/11?
Thanks Elizabeth ..And Trump made fun of Paul Pelosi at his rallies.. there has been no moment of silence for the couples in Minnesota.. I do think that Trumps side of the asile needs to stop the hate a lot more then the dems. Yesterday was a tragedy. This is terrible but I am afraid of how Trump will use this to hurt us in even more evil ways.
He uses every tragedy to HIS advantage. It is who he is.
We also still do not know who did this to Kirk, or why.
The anger and hatred is intentionally being manufactured and stoked by the right to separate us.
Part of the dialogue is to tell their base that Dems hate them, and we do not, to make it seem like a 2 sided conflict and to stoke feelings of resentment.
If you listen, GOP speeches are always about how the Dems look down on them and/or hate them and on and on, to create an us vs them mentality.
Even Hillary's speech was taken out of context, and she never even said all Trump supporters were racists or deplorable, in fact, quite the opposite, since she made it clear that was NOT what she believed in the speech, but all of that was left out by the right because without that, it was the perfect narrative they were searching for to create an us vs them for their base.
In reality, is not a “both sides are doing it issue” in fanning hate. Sure, many on the left are frustrated that so many are being sucked in by propaganda on the right, but that feeling, at least for me, is not hate but genuine concern.
I lived in NYC then. I’ll never forget.
https://open.substack.com/pub/albellenchia/p/on-911?r=7wk5d&utm_medium=ios
We are so diminished as a Nation!. I live on a street of row homes, bus stops, apartment buildings. I look on this area as my living room, passers-by as guests, and I clean it every day. "A Street is a Room, by agreement." ( F.P. Soleri). I'm trying to foster peace through hospitality.
Thank you Steven for a very poignant piece. That day I had been watching GMA and they came on with a report that a small plane or helicopter may have crashed into the first tower. After a few minutes of watching I had called my husband at work for something else, still had the TV on and was telling him what I was seeing when I saw the second plane hit. I told my husband I was afraid we were under attack. I was shocked, horrified, and completely numb. My heart was breaking for all those people, our country. Then the Pentagon, Pennsylvania, both towers collapsing, the fear of what was next. But I was so proud of our country for coming together in love and togetherness, unfortunately it didn’t last long. Now we are so far from that unity. I hope and pray we can get it back.
Pain that never really goes away.
9/11 seems so very long ago, yet at the same time, the events occurring now almost seem more dangerous to Americans. To have a felon in the People’s House, and Republicans who are so afraid to lose their jobs that they bow and kowtow to him is disgraceful. Empathy and compassion are looked upon as negative, while guns are almost worshiped, it is so difficult to watch. When they become victims of their own rhetoric, the rest of us will pay the price of their ignorance with our cities being invaded by our own government.
I know we will get through this terrible regime, but they are determined to destroy everything the sane people among us hold dear.
Very briefly, beyond thoughts about the attack and why, on the Day, as a public health physician I thought that for the safety of the rescue workers in a very dusty, presumably toxic, work environment, they should all be told to wear masks, and that masks should be provided as quickly as possibly. I remember the rage I felt when I heard that both Rudy Giuliani and Christy Todd Whitman, then head of the EPA, announced that masks were not necessary. Many people have had life-long health problems, and died, as a result of that decision and subsequent announcement.
Do you think that Rudy & Christy feel any pangs of guilt for that ?
Pangs of guilt? I don't know about Whitman, but Rudy, surely not. For if he felt pangs of guilt about that one, he would also have to have had them about his decision in the 1990s not to join the Fire and Police Depts.' radio systems, so that Fire Fighters were rushing into the building at the same time that Police were rushing out because they had been warned on the imminent collapse, a warning that did not reach the Fire Fighters, resulting in many unnecessary deaths among them. Of course, in general Rudy does not strike one as "guilt-feelings" kind of guy.
She might regret her lack of action but never Rudy. Too bad they got away with it all.
Agreed!
I don’t believe that anyone old enough who witnessed the carnage of TV will ever be able to forget the events of that day. There are times in our history that have been captured on TV that will forever move us, change us and force us to ask why?
I, as well, got a call. My dad said turn on the TV. I had just dropped my son off at pre-school and had just arrived back home. I went right back and got him. None of us knew what to think, and we stayed in shock for quite some time glued to the screen for more info, but in reality, no amount of facts or info can ever cure that feeling or ever provide enough explanation to undo that realization that we can be caught off guard and that things can change so dramatically in an instant and we will never feel as safe as we once did. We assumed we were not vulnerable and took it for granted including those in charge of our national security.
Russia's war in Ukraine is showing us that there is a whole new kind of warfare, out there, drone warfare, that we and our allies are not yet as equipped for as we likely should be. This will require revamping our capabilities, as well, including defense, and strategy, and equipment and we need to be in the capable hands of those who realize things have changed and not those who always seem to be looking to the past. An ocean separacting us is no longer serving as protection and one not need a balistic missile to reach us. We could learn a lot if we helped Ukraine more as the drone flyover into Poland's airspace was clearly a test, in my view.
Now we clearly will not be the first target beyond Ukraine, so we need to take this opportunity to prepare and modernize and we need to make it clear now, that will will not tolerate such aggression.
24 years ago, about this time in the morning I turned on the TV to see what I thought was a movie trailer and thought that was pretty graphic…got a call from the office to turn on the TV. Saw the Pentagon had been hit thinking that only a year before I would have been commuting on the train across the bridge running aside the 14th street bridge. Thought about how that would have scared anybody with a brain or conscience. At that moment I understood how my grandparents felt on December 7, 1941, or anybody felt on November 22, 1963 (exactly 4 years before I was born). The shock, horror, and raging anger was palpable. I knew the world had changed and not for the better. As a lapsed historian I knew what was coming next in the broader sense. I also understood the forces leading up to this. It has been worse than I feared. The real damage takes time to set in. As a nation we now have reaped the whirlwind of that momentous change.
I was on one of the first flights out of the country when aircraft were allowed to fly again. To South Africa. Everybody looked at each other with suspicion and a readiness to take down anybody who would dare do anything to us or that aircraft. Nobody slept on that 15+ hour flight from ATL to Cape Town.
How quickly the US went from being considered in a sympathetic light to being reviled in such a short time around the world be it Southern Africa or Latin America and the Caribbean where is did a lot of work as the US became of bully and started down the path of a police state.
Thank you for triggering these memories.
With your attuned words my heart once again wrenched from the memory of that day and subsequent days.
I arrived at working about 6:10am Denver. I was employed at a network operations center and we had huge huge television screens spanning an entire wall with various news broadcasts and a screen depicting our country with working lights at each networking station. Just before reaching my desk the first plane collided with the first tower. The business and sounds stopped as everyone faced the screens to view the unbelievable scene.
My daughter was studying at the Manhattan School of Music and even with various direct access lines of course I couldn’t reach her. I think she was about 100 blocks north of the horror.
My organization had many subsidiary locations and risk management procedures in place. There were mirrored back up systems.
Security ordered evacuations of our 3 multistory Denver locations but my organization volunteered to stay. We were each given the choice to leave or stay.
We wept
Amazingly our network operation center in New York City survived but communication were rendered useless. As I recall we eventually were able to reroute some successfully
At 3pm my daughter called. ❤️
Most of my family resided in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and 2 worked at the towers.
All were safe.❤️
An attorney friend whose firm was on the upper floors was at a different location that day.❤️
It still is haunting to consider the motivation for such attacks as these, well, and for wars where we engage in killing our own species.
Your words are heavy with meaning.
💙🇺🇸
So heavy. It has not ended.
On 9/11 it was an avowed enemy attempting to destroy America and Americans…today it’s the elected American president aka Terrorist attempting the same hideous crime! We exterminated the first attack’s mastermind…isn’t it long past time to bring the second attack’s mastermind(s) to Justice????
As one of the Heroes said “LET’S ROLL!”
I wish the Newseum were still open, though I can imagine how Trump would refashion it as the Trump Museum of Newspeak.