I don’t understand your not understanding, so I’ll let you know why it was such a big deal to me.

I moved to Manhattan in the fall of 2000. If you never were there in person, they were truly massive. Fir those like me who didn’t grow up here, they provided the best landmark ever. Come up out of a new subway stop you’d never taken? Not to worry, that way is South! They were a friendly beacon that made this town navagatable. The Polaris of pedestrians.

I remember going home one evening and coming around a corner and just simply gasped when I saw them. They made this town bigger than anything else. And then one day I came up out of the subway on 8th Street and they were on fire. A staggeringly perfect blue sky with a massive plume. I stood on a rooftop and watched one fall. I stood on a rooftop and watched the second one fall. Cars had been taken off the streets and from the eerie silence I heard everyone in the entire city wail. It was the most sorrowful, horrifying keening I ever hope to hear. Eight million crying out at once.

I waited for the subways to start working again and eventually went home. I woke up the next day and waited in line to give blood. Waited in line to ask someone if I could help out at the site. Waited for the other shoe to drop. Waoited for something else out of a Michael Bay movie to happen to something or someone else that I thought would always be there.

It’s been eight years now. I’m still here. I now work as one of the people that helps out on the Tribute in Light, the massive beams of light that show the towers again, if only for one night. It’s been good to be part of the healing process, for myself and any of those who lost someone in this tragedy when terrorism struck down three thousand people.

But you don’t care. That’s cool. People are mean to each other all the time, there’s no point in trying to stop it or even bother helping anyone else out. That’s the way you want to run your life and go back to work. But there are others around that are willing to view this and other tragedies againt man as actual tragedies, learn from them and just do what they can to help people out.

The next time you get on a New York subway, just ask anyone in the car how to get somewhere. People will argue with each other trying to get you there the best way. This town has undergone a realization that other people matter. Yeah, it gets tough sometimes and people can be jerks, but there are enough wonderful people willing to do whatever it takes, show you on a map, help to hail a cab, jump down on the subway tracks and prevent you from being killed while you’re having a seizure, that make every day worth getting up and leaving the house.

Woke up late, not long finished my job with Frank and slept in late, as is my habit when unemployed. Was having a wet shave and between splashes I could hear the radio talking about an aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center in New York. Interesting, picturing a light aircraft, I’ll put the news on when I finish, its bound to be on, did not think too deeply about it, no rush, went downstairs.

Mother watching TV, what I seen on the box did not compute with what I heard on radio a few minutes earlier, she seen a plane crash into it, I could only think Mum was watching a replay of footage, both towers on fire though? how big was this plane that set both towers on fire? Mother explained she was watching the news about a plane crashing into a building and then another crashed as she was watching, and then I walked in…

A minute or two of confusion, then the only conclusion of a plane crashing into each of the towers is it cannot be the accident as I presumed, Mum was confused I was confused and we were watching the first replays of the second plane crashing into the south tower, no accident Mum, no accident Luke. Glued, goosebumps, understanding & realizing hundreds were dead & dying with each breath inhaled, confusion, just confusion everywhere by everyone on telly, witness to murder, oh my God, hand over mouth, yes its real Mum.

I can describe the following hours of coverage as the most bizarre televisual experience of my life, spent it all with Mum. Dad was at work, I phoned him several times throughout the day, never phone Dad at work usually, wanted to hear his voice. He was listening to the radio, all over the world I imagine the common feeling of checking the whereabouts and thoughts of loved ones.

The Pentagon attacked, plane crashing in Pennsylvania?, America under attack, act of war, rumours flying over Washington D.C., evacuation, panic. A plane flies overhead, a shiver down my back, are we under attack? is this how it starts?

When the south tower collapsed the coverage was momentarily elsewhere, when the live footage returned to New York the camera position was from the top of a skyscraper looking down into a dark grey cloud of stupendous magnitude swarming Manhattan. First notion was of a nuclear bomb exploding, then the footage of it falling from every angle.. The most horrific and amazing sight I have ever watched. Every channel going apeshit with attacks everywhere, on a hundred planes that had been hijacked, of a no-fly zone in the western hemisphere. America is under attack, we are under attack.

I know enough recent history to realise it had been 60 years since anything close to this had occurred, knew this had changed EVERYTHING – Kennedy, Diana, Cuba all rolled into one. Shamed and privileged to witness this-then irrational event, a moment in time, pre 9/11 and post 9/11. Glad I was with Mum that day.

It was a sad day…

We gathered around a 12inch tv with rabbit ears and watched the second plane hit in complete shock. It’s funny, but what stands out most in my mind was this temp worker that we had working the phones, she did not know what was going on yet and laughed at all us standing there in our suits staring at this tiny little tv screen, as if we were watching “the view” or something.

As we watched the whole thing play out, one of my colleagues got a phone call from a staff member working a project at the Pentagon that he just saw a plane crash into the building. He could not reach another employee already in the building and was worried (turned out he was on the other side of the complex).

Then we heard about fighter jets being scrambled to find un-accounted for planes in NY and PA…..all within a 30 minute time frame….just insane!

On third reading, I think I realize why your reaction is so different from ours. You are analyzing the inhumanity of the terrorists as typical. We’re analyzing the humanity of the victims as atypical. I think this is why we were traumatized. We didn’t see the bad people in the plane, we saw the good people (dead and alive) on the ground.

what really affected me of course was the wars that came next, especially the one on Iraq where i heard about it on the radio on my way to school and was just in disbelief

Like many people, I assumed it was one of those little Cessnas that are often flying around Manhattan. I guessed that some green pilot had made a very bad mistake or was trying some stunt that went wrong or even decided to kill himself.

At some point, somebody said that a second plane had hit the tower and I knew that it wasn’t an accident. One plane might be, but two planes? This was clearly something planned. There was a television upstairs and I joined a bunch of people gathered around it to watch. There wasn’t much information, but I did learn that it was commercial jets, not small planes.

After a few minutes of watching, I remembered my last visit to New York. My company had an office in Midtown and I was there on business only a few month before. My boss and I stayed at the Millenion (sic) hotel right across the street from the WTC. I remembered meeting up with a friend from college in the south tower. My friend who works there. One the 100th floor. For Cantor Fitzgerald.

I returned to my desk and began a futile attempt to contact my friend. Of course the phones weren’t working and her mobile wasn’t getting through either. What followed was an afternoon of e-mailing other college friends, hoping that someone had heard from her or her parents to say she was OK. Of course, we’ve since learned that nobody where she worked survived that day.

I don’t remember leaving the office or traveling home. I don’t remember if we left early. I think we did. When I got home, my wife and I just cried. It was such an awful thing to have happened.

A few days/weeks later, I went to visit Grosvenor Square, the site of the American embassy in London. The entire square was filled with flowers. The sheer scale of sympathy from people around the world struck me and the number of people who came to lay flowers around the US embassy was an amazing sight.

As I wasn’t one of those, I wasn’t any more traumatized by this than by other great tragedies of our time. There is simply too much wrong in the world already.

I also saw an opportunity to make a fair bit of money in the stock market.

And all this on the same day that my then-best-friend lost her father.

My hubby mocks me by calling me a robot. I have a bad habit of taking it as a compliment.

I did myself the huge favor of not watching television until I got home from work. I flat out didn’t believe a co-worker who told me that the towers had fallen. It sounded like a net-rumor. But sure enough . . .

What was worse for me was the fact that I had relatives living in the city. My cousin, who still lives in Chelsea, didn’t know what was up until he got up to walk his dog. Both towers were down by then. Sound sleeper.

Another cousin was fine. A college friend was evacuated; he was a banker at the time.

And while a lot of folks from the town where I’d grown up, Locust Valley, never made it home, no one I knew died or was injured.

I offer my sorrow to all of those who lost someone.

*not all people. not all the time. I’m just remembering how fucked up everyone was toward middle eastern/Indian/Pakistani/”brown skin” people in the U.S. and getting mad.

I would like for us to do something special with this thread. Humor me, please.

I want to preserve this thread for first-person testimonies and reflections, not for internet-arguments about whether “men” are responsible, or whether one commenter is right or wrong about some theory of violence.

Those who wish to may argue or muse may do so in this 9/11 thread.

But I see dozens of amazing, real, personal accounts piling up here. It’s amazing. This is a wonderful and rare thing. It’s a living historic record.

That is the highly restricted topic I will permit in this unusual thread. I will ask our moderators to remove other noise.

Just a few weeks before the attacks, Jason Calacanis and I had put on a conference called The Rising Tide Summit in New York. I’d put together all the editorial with Jason, invited all the speakers, events were my job there. My “pet” panel at this event, the one I was really excited about that I conceived and booked, was with Ambassador L. Paul Bremer on one side, and Hussein Ibish from CAIR on the other. A debate about civil liberties of Arab-Americans in the context of the CIA’s increased anti-terror + surveillance ops. This was right when some of the smarter folks in our social circle were thinking and talking about Bin Laden. After the Cole bombing. I remember that most of the conference attendees were bored with the government guy talking about some dude in the middle east they’d never heard of and didn’t care about, and people walked out of the debate to go check their stocks. Bremer was a compelling speaker. I didn’t expect him to be as smart and eloquent as he was. The stuff he said scared me. He said Bin Laden was America’s greatest threat. Almost everyone walked out of the panel, they were there for schmoozing and internet business networking.

So a few weeks later, September 11. Back then, as now, one of the first things I did when I woke up is check email. I had recently subscribed to a new email service CNN was offering: news alert headlines by email.

I saw that morning’s headlines drop into my inbox, one by one, each more surreal than the last. “Some asshole thinks this is funny,” I thought, “CNN really ought to get a better handle on their internet security, clearly someone is pranking.” Within minutes, I was called to the living room, and soon we were all glued to the TV, watching the planes hit and the fire explode and the people soar out of the windows like gray birds, earth-ward bound.

I remember the sense of dread, and everything being different. I remember the silence in the skies in the days that followed. I remember feeling afraid and deeply depressed, and knowing everyone else around the country felt pretty much the same.

The thing I remember the most about my own personal experience, though, was reading Declan McCullagh’s politech mailing list, and sites like Boing Boing (I wasn’t part of BB at that time), and emails/essays from Dan Gillmor and John Perry Barlow and other smart, bold minds, and thinking — I have to do this. I MUST be part of this. I want my work and my life to amount to something, and I want to make the kind of contribution to truth that these people are making. I want to be that kind of journalist. I can’t do anything but this anymore, what has happened changed everything. What I do has to matter now.

The other little thing I’m remembering now, this is a little morbid funny here — a family member had recently launched an online furniture company. I was inbetween what I’d just done, and whatever I was going to do next (shitty time to start being a freelance reporter). I was working with them to build the business. We went out together on some sales calls in the field, to try and buy/sell office furniture from collapsing tech startups. I remember having long debates about when was “too soon” to do field sales calls. I think we waited like two weeks, and we had to start, because we were out of money. We walked into one biotech office building, and everything was still totally empty. Upon hearing our sales pitch, one receptionist just glared at us and — she didn’t even say anything, she willed us out with the force of her eye-lasers. We knew what she meant. That happened a lot, around that time. And we stood outside in the parking lot, and looked at each other, and said “Yeah, it’s still too soon. I guess we go home and watch more CNN.”

I remember spending a lot of time with the people I love most. And worrying about friends back in NYC. And — everyone says this, but it’s true — knowing that everything would be different after. I think I became a more “serious” person. I had more respect for friends and family members who’d forecasted this sort of doom, and the long war and terrible injustices and economic mess that have followed. I made some changes in my personal life around that time that were — how do I say this — one of the first times I felt crushed, sad, and powerless, and hit bottom and chose a path out that involved growth, positive change, and a determination to live and work differently. Some of what happened around that time made me learn what it meant to trust people in a new way. Bonds between loved ones became stronger.

So: many have spoken about what they witnessed outside, but that was what was happening for me, inside, on the other side of the country.

After that every morning I would hold my breath when I woke up and turned on the radio. I distinctly remember the huge relief I had the morning I turned on the radio and heard a commercial…

I repost my story on my blog every year as my own personal way of remembering. It was a terrible, frightening day and I always remember how lucky I am that my family and loved ones were all safe. I still can’t listen to “Midnight Radio” without crying, 8 years later.

Then shortly after they reported that the second tower had been struck and it hit me… My cousin. He worked in the second tower, on the 96th floor. My eyes began to well up with tears and I had to pull over to the side of the road because before I knew it, I was sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. I finally pulled myself together enough to get to work and talk to my family. My cousin had called my uncle when the first plane hit but no one had heard from him after that.

Our office closed for the day and I drove down to San Diego to be with family. We spent the next few days glued to the television, our only real connection to what was happening to people we loved on the other side of the country. We kept on hoping that we’d hear something… anything. Days went by and no news of his whereabouts ever surfaced. He was never found, and he will always be missed.

“So the US has five Hershey’s kisses and Afghanistan has none. What do you think they’ll do?”

“Attack them!” Laughs all around.

Shortly afterwards the PA system came on.

re: not being similarly affected about genocide in Africa, above comments…

To me the difference is that (unfortunately) the people that live in Africa are all too familiar with the daily dangers they face. For the people who worked in the towers, they had just woke up and went to work like they had done every day that week and the week before – just like I do every day without thinking. It was so sudden, unexpected, and just shocking. It could happen again, anywhere in the world, at anytime, and its scary to think about.

I worked for the local press here in Upstate New York. It was a late night, stuffing papers, as it usually was. I suppose I got home around 4 or 5 AM, and went to sleep.

That morning, I fell asleep with the television on. Just a couple minutes before the second plane hit, I woke up out of a dead sleep, and looked at the TV.

It was such an unreal day. My sister and I, for lack of anything else to do (and not wanting to stay glued to such horrible news), went out to some of the local stores that stayed open.

Our little city really was a ghost town, that day. Stores were empty, there was no one around on the roads. The only place that had any kind of activity was the local campus.

My mother worked for a coffee shop there, and I remember going in to visit her. Everyone was transfixed, and their eyes welled with tears.

It certainly was the most somber day I can remember. And very surreal.

I got to work around 11, and we had a radio running at the central librarian’s desk all day… more than slightly unusual in a public library!

My clearest memory isn’t directly related to New York, but of a CBC News “breaking news” bulletin talking about explosions in downtown Kabul… and my first thought was “Damn, the Yanks have gone off half-cocked gunning for Bin Laden and the Talibastards…”. Turned out it was just an inter-Afgan incident. I was early by a few months, I guess.

About a week later, one of our librarians was approached by a man in a suit, in tears. We had a “1000 Great Modern Buildings” photo book in the collection, with the WTC on the cover, and he’d lost several co-workers on 9/11. We moved the book behind the counter for a few months, with a note to ask a clerk for it…