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<p>In retrospect, you may be right. I was under the assumption this thread was meant to recount what we remembered/went through on that tragic day. </p>
<p>I didn’t realize it was a thread where only experiences/reflections which conforms to the comfortable orthodoxy is acceptable.</p>
<p>That final comment reminds me of the posters who bashed Ted Kennedy and the Kennedy family after he died. Please. A little sensitivity.</p>
<p>^^I find that snarky. Be sensitive. People are sharing about losses. You had one sort of experience. This doesn’t have to turn to a lengthy digest and defense, rinse and repeat, unless the group wants to move the direction. </p>
<p>I mourn the loss of my friend, have and always will. We knew him since he was about 8. he was a truly good person. I’m stunned at how close other posters were.</p>
<p>x-posted with jym. There is a time and a place, cobrat.</p>
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<p>oh give me a break! :rolleyes: </p>
<p>I wrote about how the date is almost insignificant to me due to age and lack of connection to the area. Definitely NOT orthodoxy and even semi-taboo. Readily accepted. </p>
<p>It’s just that people don’t want to hear about how YOU perceived OTHERS to have reacted to x, y, and z OVER and OVER again when people with different experiences clearly contradict you. </p>
<p>Is it EVER possible for you to admit that you don’t know the whole story or that your observations are skewed by your own biases?</p>
<p>Ironically, lookingforward, I had also typed “there is a time and a place” but deleted it before posting post #62.</p>
<p>I still remember the conversation with my now late mother the day of the attacks, and the reaction in the northern suburbs. Also remember talking to a good college friend who was walking home over the GW bridge, and frantically trying to reach his wife by phone. We didnt know at the time of our conversation that we’d lost a classmate in Tower 1.</p>
<p>I think it’s helpful for us to admit that 9/11 carries a mix of emotions, some of which are not completely altruistic, for better or worse. We’re all flawed humans, after all, whom struggle to be better.</p>
<p>One example of the continuing contrasts in our perspectives about the event and the aftermath is the difference of opinion among survivors about what items should be displayed at the Memorial Museum when it is completed. Additionally, Police and Firefighters have not always agreed about how to commemorate the loss of life among their ranks. Who can say anyone is right or wrong? It’s just the differences in what we hold dear in our memories.</p>
<p>In addition to all the images I watched on TV on 9/11, I also have this one, from Denver. A boy, maybe 15, with his pants down his butt, baseball cap backward (the standard gangsta-wanna-be look among young boys desperately wanting to be “bad”) in the black part of town. He stood on an overpass, looking down on the freeway. Waving a giant American flag. Lots of people honked below. It comforted me then; comforts me now.</p>
<p>cobrat,</p>
<p>Sometimes I wonder what planet you live on. I’m not entirely joking.</p>
<p>I too live in NYC. My friends and neighbors actually joked (with black humor) in the wake of 9/11 about how much 2 things were changed. One was that people stopped “dumping” on NYC. Go to a wedding or vacation out of town and admit that you are a NYer and be prepared for a LOT of nasty comments. My cousins–most of whom I dislike (partly as a result of their attitudes about NYC) --would go on and on about how they just couldn’t believe that anyone would choose to raise children in a HORRIBLE place like NYC. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that no longer happened. NY was part of the USA, after all!</p>
<p>The second was that–in part because we have so many internationals–New Yorkers are a little uncomfortable with displays of patriotism. I just read an interview with the local Boy Scout master (who isn’t American) about trying to comply with Scout regulations about pledge of allegiance, etc. when fully one-third of the troop aren’t US citizens. Parents feel uncomfortable with the pledge of allegiance in classrooms. Sometimes, this is because of the 'under God" part. Sometimes it was because the kids at my local public elementary are from 56 different nations. </p>
<p>But when 9/11 happened, my neighbors were out there singing “God Bless America!” at the top of their voices. And that includes my neighbors who aren’t Americans.</p>
<p>As others have said, a lot of folks from the suburbs died. A lot of people from other nations died. (One of my neighbors, a devout Muslim from Pakistan, lost her only son that day. I cannot even begin to tell you how horrified she was when she found out Muslims were involved in the attack.) </p>
<p>We were all Americans that day.</p>
<p>JFK said “Ich bin ein Berliner!” That day. people all over the world thought “I am a New Yorker!”</p>
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<p>I flew out of LaGuardia on Wednesday on purpose. I had my choice of other days, but it was my little way of taking a stand against terrorism. While looking out the window, I was amazed to see that beam of light (appeared to be one beam from my angle). It DID reach as high as our plane. I couldn’t contain my emotions and turned to the woman next to me to tell her to look. Unfortunately, she didn’t speak English and I don’t think she saw it.</p>
<p>Good for you toledo!</p>
<p>One thing that bothers me about 9/11 is how quickly conspiracy theories cropped up afterwards. Especially about the Pentagon being hit by a “missile”. Ahhhhh, it just makes me want to slap some people. Snap out of it! </p>
<p>I must say I didn’t hear any NYC bashing but it, sadly, seems possible for those of a similarly idiotic mindset.</p>
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<p>nice story PackMom…</p>
<p>Mine is similar, but I was focused on the “why didn’t we know this was going to happen?”… that’s what I wanted to know as a 10th grader.</p>
<p>12 years later, I spent 9/11 in the basement of the Pentagon in the nerve center of U.S. military power, working a 14 hour day monitoring worldwide events and preparing material that goes straight to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. </p>
<p>In my still short career, I have had the chance to work with some Special Forces (Army) guys that work at the tip of the spear… sometimes they come through our buildings as part of certain training for certain qualifications. I consider it an honor.</p>
<p>Where’s the “like” button. Nice work, packmom’s ds and soccerguy.</p>
<p>"If you read more carefully, you’d realize those aren’t people I hung out with. </p>
<p>Just acquaintances who were neighbors of suburban relatives and strangers who upon knowing about my background started into their BS. After three months of that, I had enough and decided the best thing is to not discuss it unless it’s someone I know well and can trust to not act that way. "</p>
<p>Everybody’s got a relative somewhere who’s got a cranky neighbor. But normal people don’t engage with them. You have a quality of engaging with random people and blowing up in their comments in your mind to the point where you’d think that every time you turned around, you were being harassed about being a New Yorker. Cobrat, you’re just not that important in people’s lives that these alleged cranks are going to seek you - the cousin of a neighbor - out to express their opinions. I think you read into casual interactions way more than what is intended.</p>
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This part of his comment puzzled me. Not understanding the reference to “his background” and whatever it is about his “background” (does that mean being a NY’er?) that would supposedly prompt some stranger or relatives neighbor to launch into an insensitive tirade. And under what circumstances would someone have any ongoing interaction over several months with one’s relatives’ neighbors? I barely have a chance to chat with my own neighbors let alone someone elses neighbors.</p>
<p>As a NYC resident, my post 9/11 experience was so different from cobrat’s. I found people to be so kind. I remember meeting a family from Florida on the beach there I February, and the mother asking me how people were doing in NYC now. 5 months afterwards…amazing, I thought.</p>
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<p>None. It’s all delusional. Cobrat imagines these interactions with random strangers and acquaintances who, unprompted, always seem to offer these really strong opinions on everything. You know the interaction I have with random strangers? None, aside from maybe “excuse me” if I bump them in the line at Starbucks. You know the interaction I have with acquaintances? “Hello, how about this weather.” No one launches into tirades about anything the way Cobrat routinely imagines.</p>
<p>I can say that NYC was a very tough place for Muslims or people who looked or had names that were Muslim. One of my daughter’s classmates in Kindergarten in lower Manhattan had a Malaysian mom and Iranian-American (U.S. citizen) dad. He was a math professor in a CUNY college. The mom picked up my daughter and took her home one day when I couldn’t get to school in time. This was a couple of weeks into September 2001. When the dad came home, he told me that colleagues, fellow professors he had known for years, wouldn’t get into the elevator with him. And for many months, whenever I went downtown I could see many, many adult male green card holders from Arab countries lined up outside 26 Federal Plaza who were required to register their addressses.</p>
<p>For anyone who didn’t look like a white American, it could be difficult.</p>
<p>As for knowing one’s relatives’ neighbors, NYC is like that. People live in apartment buildings and share the steps and elevators and narrow streets face to face in many neighborhoods. They may not be friends but they know the faces of one another and their relatives as well.</p>
<p>As a person who didn’t know any victims personally but who lived through months of paranoia and inconvenience in the city what with street closings, bomb scares, subway diversions, friends not in the immediate Ground Zero neighborhood who lost their phone service for months, etc., I did feel that people who didn’t live through it just didn’t get it. So many teddy bears were donated by children all over the country that my daughter was given at least 10 in her elementary school–kind of hard to explain to a 5-year-old why all these teddy bears while trying to pretend everything was “normal.” Police officers from all over the country who had volunteered, and were put to work directing traffic around the areas of the city whose streets were closed to auto traffic–twisted streets supervised by earnest men who had no idea what they were doing. Stuff like that was very alienating.</p>
<p>oldmom,
it would make some sense if we were talking about people/neighbors in NYC highrises. Thats reasonable. But the comments were reportedly made by people in the suburbs to “bash liberal new yorkers”. Thats hard to fathom.</p>
<p>I just hope this doesn’t revert to another rinse and repeat. You know what I mean.</p>
<p>I do expect some posters, especially after it’s been pointed out numerous times, to be able to distinguish between anecdote/some random strangeness versus purported " absolute truth." I don’t care how many people in one’s circle (or umpteen degrees of relatedness or 7 levels of Hell) agree with that person in his or her life- it doesn’t make it universal. We get waylaid, trying to temper it. </p>
<p>We all hammer, at times- I mean this freaking spotlight. When it starts to feel uncomfortably trollish.</p>
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<p>I wasn’t trying to say my experience was an absolute truth. </p>
<p>Just that in that 3 month period, I was unlucky to encounter a lot of jerks from random suburban neighbors of relatives in different areas who exploited the awful day to start obnoxiously making unsolicited political comments bashing NYC liberalism and multiculturalism once they found out I was from NY. </p>
<p>It got to the point I got wary of having any conversation about that day unless it’s with someone I’ve known for a while and who won’t go off like that. What made it worse was it foreshadowed/coincided with a lot of anti-Muslim/immigrant backlash and lockstep patriotic orthodoxy* which occurred not too long after that. </p>
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<li>I.e. One must agree or not voice any disagreement with “Real Americans” positions on anything ranging from immigration issues, ignorant/prejudicial remarks against certain minorities(I.e. Muslims, Hispanics…especially Mexicans), or on the recent wars or in how it was conducted or else one is labeled “unpatriotic”.<br></li>
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<p>Indeed. There were attacks on Muslims/“Muslim looking folks” in the eyes of ignorant rage filled jackasses in the Tri-state area and there was an atmosphere of “Kill them all” in some quarters. A few HS classmates who “looked like they were Muslim” had many scary encounters. They probably would have had much worse abuse heaped upon them by the jerks I encountered if they were within their sight.</p>