9/11 East vs West

[bralbovsky]

So my daughter is in California, and experiencing her first 9/11 surrounded by folks who mostly were asleep when it actually happened.

Living in NY, having folks whose families were directly connected (No one we personally knew perished) watching the events unfold in her classroom that morning, not being able to get in touch with her grandfather (Working at the Pentagon), and being in the actual physical emotional shockwave of the whole thing, is sort of personal.
Apparently not so much three time zones away. It is her first criticism of life in Cali, which she otherwise finds a paradise. That the folks around her just pretend to understand.

This board has a fairly wide sweep, anybody have an opinion on that?

[Tahlvin]

Imagine what it's like for folks who lived in Hawaii, who were another few time zones further west?! The 9/11 attacks happened in the middle of the night, from their perspective!

It is definitely odd.

Another thing that struck me this morning as weird is that the current class of high school seniors will be about the last class of high school students where any significant portion of the students were alive on 9/11/2001.

[Mike]

I find the whole thing odd. Did age play into it as well? Because in the central time zone, I heard about the first plane on the way to work, and then the Pentagon. Only after the second tower did we all go pile into the common room to watch the TV coverage for most of the rest of the day. This went on into well into the afternoon. I'm surprised to think two hours on opening day (in preface to months of national soul searching) made THAT much difference to an entire time zone.

[bralbovsky]

It was her first week of second grade. Her teacher had personal connections. And. of course, it wouldn't go away. There was no next storm.
Ours is a small town anyway, so when the firefighters we sent to help came down with cancer simultaneously (about six years later) we still felt, at least a little, in the splash zone. That congress is still debating compensation for first responders this month, apart from being appalling, indicates that some folks just never got it.

The coverage, and inquest, and recovery were in our backyard for a long time. When she went to school in NYC, that cemented her connections. You wouldn't think that a few thousand casualties would touch virtually all of seven million residents, but they collectively inhaled the dust of their neighbors for a while, and that sort of sealed it.

Vietnam is the closest analog I can come up with, that touched lots of disparate folks for a tragic reason, and wouldn't go away. Hasn't gone away.

[poorpete]

I know it's a generization, but I've seen it, in comedy at least. I think there's a detachment. The Sarah Silverman Program and South Park, both LA productions, thought it ready to find comedy in way before anyone in the east comedy scene. and it was cringy. I went to one comedy show in NYC a year after where someone made a 9/11 joke, and it fell flat. Dunno if he was from the west, but he definitely did not read the room. Sure he thought the joke was funny, and no doubt a few others, but for most it was still a open wound, and my easy-to-anger friend next to me said he wanted to go back stage and punch him (he didn't thankfully). Dunno if it was bluster, but that's how personal it felt.

I remember rumours, dunno if true, that there was at least one party in LA soon after then featured the 9/11 attacks in super-slow-motion, in the background. Like, this isn't a tragedy, this isn't trauma, this is art, art to be enjoyed with a drink and friends.

[poorpete]

But I get it, kinda, when it comes to the North Korea crisisises. Everytime there's a threat, my western friends get apocalyptic while I'm allowed to breathe easy and try to comfort them and tell them it's very unlikely, but really the fact I feel safe makes me detached from all that.

[mimekiller]

I was going to college at the time and it took a bit to sink in the scale of "WORLD TRADE CENTERS" being destroyed was when the building name at first met absolutely nothing, but I was awake, I remember walking around campus seeing every class glued to the TV screen and thinking "wow...does this mean I can just go home?"

gilbert gottfried did a 9/11 joke on like 9/29 during the comedy central roast of Hugh Hefner lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... 6VfCA3ZRhI

[Tahlvin]

I was at the annual users group meeting for the healthcare software company I worked for, and we had a bunch of IT and executive folks from customers all across the country, including a number of hospitals in DC and NYC. They interrupted the key note speech to play the news on the screen instead. I remember an executive from an NYC hospital announcing that he was renting transportation back to NYC to get to his hospital and help, and inviting anyone else in the area to go along. Since all flights were canceled, our company helped many of the rest of our customers connect with people going to the same destination to arrange for shared ground transportation.

A few years later, I worked an install at a healthcare organization in the DC area. One of the head people on the project always had to carry around a beeper so she could be contacted if there was another terrorist attack in the area.

[mimekiller]

Interesting note on how this country operates in those situations is my dad, a CHP officer in Northern California, was directed to pack a day bag in case he needed to go ANYWHERE in the event that 9/11 was about to start a string of attacks coast to coast.

[Phoebe]

At that time the old man and I were living a more successfully decadent lifestyle in middle America, so we were both still laying in bed watching a little morning cnn right when it happened, and saw the whole thing play out from the beginning. We sat there transfixed, called our parents to make sure they knew, and decided not to waste phone use after. When it became obvious it wasn't just a random accident or one mad pilot, husband gassed up the car because that is generally step one in whatever.

Where I live, still a big deal; we discussed it extensively at work today.

[poorpete]

I remember friends, family members, people in the media, saying September 11 was the new normal. Sleeper cells, random attacks every month, an endless fight where no civilian was safe. Who knew it wasn't going to be a monthly 9-11, but a monthly Columbine instead.