Export thread

As a board with a strong international presence, I often wonder how certain significant days in our nation's (America) history means to them. Today specifically stands out for our nation since the events are fairly recent in our history. So I ask- What does today mean to you? Is it just another day?

All I ask is we keep it civil. Be honest and respect everyone's opinions.

At the time, I was terrified of what might come next and, of course, deeply saddened for the lost of so many innocent lives.

To be honest, though, the whole 9/11 tragedy has been brought up on so many occasions by everyone, including Bush on every possible opportunity, that I'm almost sick of hearing about it. On top of that, so many people have used it to make money in one way or another, especially Hollywood, with references as recent as that crap movie, Remember Me. Something that was disheartening and tragic has become just another thing to exploit for money. And, of course, if it wasn't for 9/11, there wouldn't have been a better excuse to go into Iraq, again. It just feels like something that was, at the time, an incredibly tragic incident, has turned into something ugly because of how it's been exploited.

Plus, with the whole controversy with a mosque built relatively close to Ground Zero (seriously? Wouldn't building it be a good showing by true Muslims that they're not all the enemy?) or the recent debacle with the Florida church planning to burn 200 copies of the Qur'an, anyone of Muslim belief can't even feel safe.

Today is Catalonia's national day, but as a generally nationalist but not that much active nor extremist, this day generally means nothing special. When I went to school, it usually meant "summer vacations are almost over".

When the terrorist attack happenned, I was completely in awe. It was like something from a film, and I was sure World War III was coming soon. I tried to get my little brother to watch it on tv, but he was busy in the Deku Temple.

I remember standing on the roof of my building in Manhattan, numbly looking at the smoke cloud, unable to believe that this was really happening. I remember wondering if my friends and family who worked in or near the WTC were okay. I remember trying to get my parents on the phone to let them know that I was totally okay, and I hadn't been anywhere near Lower Manhattan, let alone the towers, and being unable to get through because all the lines were busy.

All I have to say about what came afterwards is that 9/11 is going to be remembered in history as the day that the US began to unravel into a slow spiral of jingoistic insanity. I can only hope we pull out of it before it's too late.

Today? It means work.

Wait, what?

It's football day. Go Tennessee!

To me, it's like all those people who claim to be so religious yet only attend services on Christmas or who support a cause through changing their status on Facebook and do nothing to really help.

To be even more cynical - 9/11 was bad. But I'd rather mourn and remember the days the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started. Those have ruined far more Americans' lives and families than 9/11. Those conscious, sober choices killed exponentially more innocents than 9/11.

Regardless, it's been an extremely shitty and bleak 9 years that probably wouldn't have happened without 9/11.

I forgot that it was 11/9. Just another day at work for me.

Not to rain on the sentiment a lot of folks have mind you, it just slipped my mind is all.

When I heard about WTC, I was driving home from high school, worrying about the written French segment of my matriculation examination. I laughed like a madman when I heard the news from the radio, it was just so absurd, so unbelievable, so completely out of the blue... and yes, I feared this would be the beginning of WWIII.

After that, I've slowly grown more and more cynical when it comes to American politics, particularly this kind of isolationism where some US politicians seem to think it's United States' right to go crap in everybody else's cereal. Like people have said, I thought 9/11 was a tragedy. How it has been exploited is a travesty.

No more tears for that.

Catalonia's national day, as SJ said, so it cheers me up a lot, but also makes me miss home and all the stuff that goes on today there.

Thanks everyone for sharing!

The electric bill is due in three days, the parts for the flux capacitor are late, and I still have no idea where to get plutonium ever since the Libyans backed out and sold my shit to some asshole Dr. Brown.

Seraphyn said:

I forgot

Click to expand...

But....

Actually I did too.

It's kinda funny too, because I've been looking forward to today for a while. How sick is that?

I was in highschool when the WTC attack happened. I remember thinking at first that it was an accident, and then how absurd it seemed that it would be an attack. I even made jokes about it with friends at lunch, because it just didn't seem real. It wasn't until I got home, and turned on the news, and spent the rest of the night watching the news and on the internet, trying to soak in everything that had happened. I remember being in a bnet chat room for diablo 1, which is where most of my friends would gather online, and swapping a flurry of news links as we tried to keep up.

Now, like most, I've grown cynical. I still feel it was a terrible tragedy, but I get tired of people always bringing it up. I feel like the impact of the event has been overshadowed by the politics, and I can't help but feel that any time anyone mentions it, it's only because they have an agenda.

Tonight, the history channel held a documentary, 102 minutes that changed the world, that spliced together civilian video footage of the event, in semi-real time, from the first impact to the final collapse. It's the first time since it happened that I've watched this much actual footage, and was in fact the first time I ever saw actual, clear footage of the second tower being struck. I'm left feeling shaken, remembering what it was like when it first happened, and seeing it without agenda for the first time in what feels like forever.

Before flipping past that program, and watching, it was just another day.

Today is my birthday, I went to Sizzler and stuffed myself :biggrin:

Reboneer said:

Today is my birthday, I went to Sizzler and stuffed myself :biggrin:

Click to expand...

I stuffed your mom.

My wife and I were talking about this today... if I had been an NYPD officer at that time, I would probably not be alive today.

I'm one of those cops whom firefighters call "blue canaries," because I don't stay away from firefighter calls. (Canaries because we serve like the canaries that miners used to take down in the mine with them - if the canary died, there was too much CO and it was tim to go.) I've run into burning buildings on two occasions so far, and been flat terrified both times, but the thought of staying out has yet to occur to me.

If I'd been in New York, there is little doubt in my mind that I would have been running into the towers, or right at the base, helping as best I could. Because I'm kinda dumb that way; I get tunnel vision.

So, yeah. Say what you will. I wore my mourning stripe today.

I was in college. I had gotten up that morning to get ready to go to school, trying not to wake my roommate up because he didn't have classes until later. By the time I got out of the bathroom, he was awake and saying, "Dude, someone crashed a plane into one of the World Trade Center towers!" He had the t.v. on and no one knew at the time what was going on for sure. I headed to school, and between classes I would go into the cafeteria to watch the big screen in there to see the latest developments. It was surreal, especially when they started showing footage of the huge dust clouds chasing the people through the streets after the towers collapsed. I kept thinking, "This can't be real, this like some bad action movie!" What made it worse was that my dad was suppose to fly home that day from work in Alaska, but couldn't when they grounded all the flights. He ended not being able to come home until the end of the week.

The comments and post from different sources really illuminate the political views of each place. On Facebook since most of one side of my relatives are conservative it is never forget and links to stories about the day. On reddit it is don't forget we fucked up 2 countries killed bunch of innocent people and wasted a ton of money. Just interesting to see how different people react to a single day.

But it shouldn't be a single day. We should always remember the events and the people who died that day 9 years ago. We should thank those who selflessly serve the public (firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and so on). We should think of the men and women who have gone overseas and put their lives on the line, or given their lives, in service of this country. We should do what we can to show our appreciation for the sacrifices they and their families make for us. Not just on Patriot Day, but every single day.

/soapbox

One of my friends actually saw a 9/11 card at a store last week. I'm all for remembering the actual sacrifice made by the first responders, and the service members who have died since then (and before then), and mourning the loss of all of the lives from that day; but Hallmark cards are a step too far in the direction of making this just another holiday that we use as an excuse to spend money on each other and completely diminishing the meaning of the day, if not destroying it outright. I do agree with your soapbox though. If you want to see a good documentary about a (small) group of people who really do live way, you should watch "The Way We Get By." It's available for direct streaming from Netflix, if'n you have it.

Wasabi Poptart said:

But it shouldn't be a single day. We should always remember the events and the people who died that day 9 years ago. We should thank those who selflessly serve the public (firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and so on). We should think of the men and women who have gone overseas and put their lives on the line, or given their lives, in service of this country. We should do what we can to show our appreciation for the sacrifices they and their families make for us. Not just on Patriot Day, but every single day.

/soapbox

Click to expand...

The sad thing is I think there is a hierarchy of respect that public servers get, I would have to say it feels around Firefighter/EMT > Police > Military. Military hops up if there is an actual war that threatens us but since that doesn't apparently seem to be occurring at least not hugely publicly they are generally not as respected because they aren't seen as protecting us from an immediate danger. As well with the current involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan has brought up such things as torture and killing of civilians which instantly make front page and trump any good they have done.

Police get shit on because a few people like to abuse their power and make everyone else super weary of them, and only rarely do people have truly good run ins (ie the saved them from a robbery). EMT and firefighters though, they I don't think can do anything that would upset the public unless they were grossly negligent, and even then it would be a one in a million style thing.

My point merely is that only 2/4 of the basic set of people who serve us really are respected by all, and the other 2 tend to get shit on a lot.

Personally I sometimes wonder about the repercussions of 9/11. Not just the two wars, the loss of life, the politicians blaming each other for not being patriotic enough... but also what has changed in the past nine years. Now, I'm not going to say that the world has become a more dangerous place to live, but it has certainly become a degree more fearful. News about terrorists, suicide bombers, cell activity, WMDs, pre-emptive strikes, fear of people not like you - whether due to the colour of their skin, their religion, their ethnicity - and so on. Heck, the whole kerfluffle with the Islamic cultural center in New York is a prime example, with some people treating it like setting up a necrophiliac sex club next to a cemetery.

What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any attempt to return to pre-9/11 status. The world's become polarized and fearful, and this Friday I realized something. The 3rd-graders I teach were 8- and 9-year-olds, born around or after the 9/11 attacks. They have never known a world where terms such as "insurgent", "pre-emptive strike", "WMDs", "terrorism" and so on were not part of one's every-day parlance. And that, I must say, saddens me deeply.

North_Ranger said:

What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any attempt to return to pre-9/11 status.

Click to expand...

QFT.

SpecialKO;436379][QUOTE=North_Ranger said:

What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any attempt to return to pre-9/11 status.

Click to expand...

QFT.[/QUOTE]

Double. I think that sentence really hits on so much of what has gone wrong since 9/11.

crono1224 said:

The comments and post from different sources really illuminate the political views of each place. On Facebook since most of one side of my relatives are conservative it is never forget and links to stories about the day. On reddit it is don't forget we fucked up 2 countries killed bunch of innocent people and wasted a ton of money. Just interesting to see how different people react to a single day.

Click to expand...

To me, both extremes are stupid. There's nothing wrong with feeling more affected by something that's closer to you, whether you measure that distance in miles, time, or culture. It's human nature. Calling attention to the wars is a classic non-sequiter in my eye. Complain about one, complain about the other, but linking from one to another in an argument over emotional reaction is tenuous at best. And that's just my reaction to my fellow liberals. Don't get me started on the other extreme.

As for me, I can't help watching the footage from that day. It was terrible. Part of me wants to argue with myself that it's not the most deadly event in human history, and that Americans have been guilty of worse in terms of casualties (remember those two vaporized cities, civilians and all?), but it wasn't an active wartime, and it wasn't a military target with a demonstrable strategic benefit, and the weapon itself--people rarely talk about that side of it because the tower crashes alone are bad enough. What it must've been like for the passengers of those flights...

I'm not going to lie, be macho, or try to retroactively be cool. It affected me deeply. I still see those airplanes and try to push them back every time. I see the view from inside the fuselage. I see the people looking out their windows at the incoming aircrafts, frozen in terror. I loved how for a tiny moment, people actually cared about each other, and cared less about getting the upper foothold. Before it mutated into a pitchfork and torches rally.

crono1224 said:

The sad thing is I think there is a hierarchy of respect that public servers get, I would have to say it feels around Firefighter/EMT > Police > Military. Military hops up if there is an actual war that threatens us but since that doesn't apparently seem to be occurring at least not hugely publicly they are generally not as respected because they aren't seen as protecting us from an immediate danger. As well with the current involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan has brought up such things as torture and killing of civilians which instantly make front page and trump any good they have done.

Police get shit on because a few people like to abuse their power and make everyone else super weary of them, and only rarely do people have truly good run ins (ie the saved them from a robbery). EMT and firefighters though, they I don't think can do anything that would upset the public unless they were grossly negligent, and even then it would be a one in a million style thing.

My point merely is that only 2/4 of the basic set of people who serve us really are respected by all, and the other 2 tend to get shit on a lot.

Click to expand...

I've seen the EMTs and firefighters get crapped on by the public. In my hometown, which is admittedly very small, the fire company is all volunteers. There are no pensions, no salaries, or any other compensation besides wanting to help the community. One or possibly several of the "concerned" citizens in the surrounding community (my hometown is part of a township with 3 other small towns) started a public website where they go to rip apart the public servants under the veil of anonymity - though the area is small enough you can figure out who's doing the bitching. There are some real concerns brought up, like response times to a fire being slow, but mostly it is filled with contempt, rumor about personal lives, and outright slander. It's their right to say these things, but at the same time it makes me angry that these people who have not done a single thing to help the community can pass judgment on the men and women who will save their asses when the time comes.