Atheist Ireland Forum

As this years this marks the tenth anniversary of the attacks, does anyone here remember were they where that day?

errr....Yes

Yes in the car, I got a text and didn't understand it. My mate texted me with "Twin Towers no more"

I got the meaning when I arrived home and switched on the telly.

In our lab in TCD - then we all ran over to the Pav bar to watch on the big screen !

I was in secondary school on our way to play football for PE. We passed by the school Chaplain's house and he had it on the telly.

I felt sick for the whole game of football - it was awful.

Sorry for being so abrupt.
I was in Cork in an electronics shop, at first I thought it must be a clip for a new movie, after a while it sunk in, so I moved to another TV-shop around the corner that had bigger TV's, there were a two American girls in there who were very upset.
History is scarred with terrible events.

I was at home making breakfast during that atrocity.
I was driving to work when they sacked Baghdad.
I was on holidays during the blitz on Gaza.
I was picketing when the prisoners were being passed through Shannon for torture.
I was rioting when the GIs massacred the village of Mi Lai.

The question assumes that murdered Americans deserve more sympathy than other victims.

really? how so?

really ? do tell?

Well the OP never mentioned Americans and I'm sure there were non-Americans also murdered on that day.

Iwas in Jeddah - Saudi Arabia, when I saw it on Sky news acouple of hours after it happened - I phoned my brother in Dubai who was one of the project managers on the Emirates Towers - to tell hime his towers were no longer second tallest! The overwhelming feeling of Saudis at my workplace was that of "what did they expect" meaning the american authorities. There seemed to be little pity for the victims and a thinly veiled (no pun intended) pride in the fact that most of the ehrm..."martyrs" were Saudi nationals.

I was in bed fast asleep having just watched the latest episode of, what was at the time one of my favourite tv shows called "The Street". The show was set on Wall Street and was cancelled soon after 9/11 for that reason. In Brisbane time the plane hit at about 11:15pm.

When I heard about the news the next morning it took me about 2 hours to understand what had happened. I remember getting bits and pieces of detailed information, enough to know something big happened, but not enough to understand what happened. I remember getting extremely irritated that they wouldn't take a step back and say what happened, where and when.

When I finally did understand what had happened, my initial reaction was basically the same as Feardorcha. This is a bigger more important story than genocides and masacres that occured all over the world previously... because it predominantly involved Americans and other westerners.

9/11 was a tragedy. But the imbalanced attention that this tragedy has received in comparison to others, to me, is an example of something that is very wrong with the world we inhabit.

I was working in Galway, 2FM was on the radio as usual. I remember it being reported that a light plane struck one of the towers, later it was reported that a rescue helicopter had crashed too.
The reports initially were very confused, over the course of the afternoon things became clearer and everyone was on the net trying to get details.

I think 9/11 is the only "Everyone remembers where they were when...." news event in my lifetime.
I was discussing that with work colleagues the other day and someone mentioned Diana Spencer being killed in the car crash in Paris but that seemingly didn't make much of an impression on me.

I don't think the question implied that 9/11 is more or less significant than other horrific events around the globe; I think it's more to do with the 10-year-anniversary being this week, I think that's a significant milestone, and there's no doubt that it's in the media a lot at the moment and therefore hard to avoid.

I was in my World History class, as I was in 10th grade. My teacher had got an e-mail from the administration to notify him that a plane had hit the WTC. He stood up and informed us, and we stopped working as he turned on the classroom television. We watched as the second plane hit.

It was scary as nobody knew what was going on. It being an American school with 4000 students, it was unavoidable that many had family members in New York, and as the day progressed and there were other attacks outside NY, a teacher for some reason thought it a good idea to point out Houston (where I lived) might be of strategic importance to America's enemies because of the oil reserves.

Re: Bik - Diana made an impression on me. Maybe not necessarily because of the event itself, but the manner in which I was told. I was only young, but I am the oldest child and so my dad woke me up and got me out of bed to tell me what had happened. (I was, as above, in the US, so I think it was quite late when he saw the news. I recall it being around 1 AM). Certainly I was as fond of Diana, no more or less, than the average person, but I think he might have felt more compelled to tell me straight away because my mother was still at work and he was alone. Either way, being taken out of bed to be told bad news is certainly something one remembers.

According to Atheist Nexus, Mike Bloomberg insisted that the ceremony for the 9/11 anniversary at Ground Zero was to be completely secular. They say



They are also asking people to contact him to thanks him for the decision, given that he'll likely get a lot of complaints; here:

http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.bd08ee7c7c1ffec87c4b36d501c789a0/index.jsp?doc_name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fmail%2Fhtml%2Fmayor.html

An interesting decision on a highly emotional day.