Ten years ago, where I was.
Autor: Meg | Publicado: 2011-09-11T19:01:00-07:00

In North-American recent history, there has been a lot of discussion on, for example, "Where were you when JFK was killed?" 

I believe now we can talk about where we were when the Twin Towers fell. 

It was a particularly beautiful day, both in NY and where I was, here down south. I woke up to the newsflash of an airplane having hit the tallest building in New York city, and I watched the chaos and panic in my PJ's, without even having breakfast, thinking 'what a terrible accident... but even if it were the tallest building, why would an airplane fly so low...?'

I didn't have to wonder twice.

Right then, right there, right in front of me, another airplane came and crashed into the other tower. (my heart's pounding to remember it.) All I could think was 'Oh fuck. Oh fuck. This is not right. This is not a normal accident. This is war. We're screwed, we're all screwed' (forgive the language, dear reader, but I was 15 and teenagers have a slight tendency to swearing.)

I was really into the X-Men back then, and as a kid I was, I began fantasizing about having all superheroes drafted into the crash site and helping evacuate as many people as possible from there. They actually went there, as police officers, as firefighters, as volunteers - all superheroes.

Then it gets a little blurry in my mind. 9/11 is also my godmother's birthday and we went to the shopping mall for a celebratory lunch, but I was hardly in a celebratory mood. My mom saw I was really worried and tried to get my mind off it but I stuck to every TV I found at the mall, and I found out about the fall of both towers, as well as the Pentagon attack, and the fourth hijacked plane that was re-hijacked and taken down by the out-worldly courageous passengers. 

Later that evening, I did what I always did - I went online to chat via mIRC with my foreign friends at #eoff, where you'd see then and now people from all over the world, with a majority of American and British people. 

We'd heard on the news there was this terrorist network with this heavily-bearded boss who was getting back at the Americans by their occupation of Afghanistan like, ten or twelve years before, that had left the country in crumbles. Uh, hello? Calling the UN for help also works? But no, they probably thought, 'hey, let's explode other people's buildings because they've got stuff and we don't - calling for help is the stuff of cowards.' As far as I knew on my teenage wisdom, cowardice would actually be killing 3000+ people that had absolutely NOTHING to do with what had happened 15 years back. 

On IRC, we were in a collective state of shock. We were saddened that all that ruckus had gone down on NY and at the same time, glad that no family members of #eoff had been there, or hurt. We were all affected. And most of all, we were timidly wondering if there would be WWIII and the end of the world. I'm happy to have lived for these ten years and say that there was no WWIII. If it were, we wouldn't be here. None of us. 

I don't know what to say about what happened after the attack; I don't think I'd have made the same choices as Bush did, but then again, I wasn't on his very eloquent shoes. So I'd better have my thoughts cook up another 10 years and see what I think by then. 

So, where were you ten years ago?