Did anyone but me not care when 9/11 happened?

Post Reply New Topic

i found the events of 9-11 very inconvenient and annoying.

i already wrote in another thread about my attitude to it, and was roundly lambasted about my apparent lack of consideration for the people who died, so, in order to obviate any more angry comments, i will say that i agree that the people who were killed had a very bad day, and that the people who knew them also had a bad day.

anyway, i was asleep with the TV on, on a night when i had to go to work the next day (i worked 9-5 in an office at that time). i woke up for a small amount of time as i often do, and i glanced at the TV and i saw the 2 towers burning. i thought "that is a stunning visual effect" (thinking it was a movie), and i rolled over and closed my eyes, and i was going back to sleep when i heard the commentary.

i sleepily thought "it is also extremely well acted" because usually in movies, the portrayal of the media coverage sounds fake, and this did not. i was drawn back to wakefulness by this, and i then rolled back and watched, and i thought "this must be the best example of realism in any movie i ever saw".

then i started to wonder if it was true, so i decided to change the channel because if it was true, then it would be on every channel, and it was!

i sat up and thought "good god! both buildings are burning", and i heard that they were hit by airliners, and i knew it must be a terrorist attack.

then i saw the south tower seeming to be coming down, and i could not really tell because of the dust, but the dust cleared and the tower was not there!
i was aghast because i always had an interest in skyscrapers, and i was intimately familiar with the history of the construction and the specifications of the world trade centers. i looked at as many pictures as i could all through my childhood of skyscrapers, and now this one was gone forever.

then, as i was digesting the truth of the fact that one of my favorite buildings was gone, the north tower also came down. there was nothing but empty space where i always had known them to be. it just was so upsetting to me that i took ages to get back to sleep.

the next day, i was very tired and did not want to wake up because i lost valuable sleep because it was interrupted by the proceedings of the attack, and it was extremely inconvenient to me to have been woken up by the events because i felt like garbage for the rest of the day. i was cursing arabs all day.

then, when i got the next release of microsoft flight simulator, the scenery for new york did not include the world trade centers, and i felt additionally ripped off. new york does not look nearly as much fun to fly around without the twin towers.

so i did care about 9-11, but i returned to equilibrium rather quickly.

the burj dubai tower is a nice building, and, although nothing can take place of the twin towers, new impressive buildings are cropping up all the time.

i also felt that the 2 planes involved were a great loss. they were destroyed for a useless reason, and if only they could have given one of the planes to me, i would have taken care of it and treasured it, and i would not smash it up.

i am sure the people who jumped out of the building from floors above the impact would have experienced a reality that is equivalent to hell, and i know that they did not deserve to experience such a situation in their lives. but i do not know much about that aspect of it.

I was shocked. To reference Star Wars, it was like what Obi Wan said when Alderaan was blown up. I could hear the voices of all those people for one moment and in the next, nothing more. Even now, I think I can hear the voices of every single dying person on this earth.

Like Bob Dylan said, "He not busy being born is busy dyin''.

But that's besides the point, I guess.

Thinking about another tragic event, I remember when I was 8 and Princess Diana died, I didn't care then.

But I developed some sense of pathos and in such events, I do feel pain for what my imagination takes me.

I was saying this for years. When 9/11 happened, I was completely unaffected. I never cried over it and didn't care. Still don't. I get the political ramifications of it and I can stand on one point or another whether it was right or whether it's right to retaliate, etc, but I have no emotional attachment to the event.

The nationalist fervor that followed was one of human empathy and politicized nationalism. On one hand, we have Asperger's so it's not surprising we can be unempathetic- or at least not outwardly. On the other, I myself am very deeply touched by this event. We're all different. There's nothing wrong with apathy as long as you don't complain.

I will be very blunt about what I'm, about to say; I bet you heartless basters would of cared if any of your family or friends was a victim. The mockery you bring on your families for being so arrogant. People by the millions lost their lives that faithful day and people are complaining because it got in the way of the tv program.


Have a heart

Perhaps it has something to do with AS. When a living thing suffers horribly and dies I feel something of the pain personally. I have enough imagination to emotionally and intellectually comprehend what it must be like to feel desperate enough to leap to a horrible quick death leaving a wife and kids behind rather than burn to a inevitable death more horribly. Evidently there are people here without that imaginative capability. You cannot blame them for that lack, just as you cannot blame people for being stupid or gullible or suffering from an incurable disease. It's just pitiful.

To mention that there are other more numerous horrors taking place all the time has no bearing on the matter.

On the day it happened, I was in shock, but not overwhelmed. I didn't cry. Sometimes thinking about it horrifies me, and the terror and suffering of the victims hits me.

I am sorry to say that on 911 I was not really aware of what was happening in the world. My own personal world was going to hell in a hand basket. I had just moved into an apartment for the first time in my life and on that day everything just seemed to go horribly wrong. First someone stole my wallet with my bank card and personal information cards after I accidentally left it by a pay phone in town. Then I could not get get any sleep that night. I was having a very bad time sleeping back then and the fact that a neighbor was blasting loud music on a cd that constantly stuttered didn't help. The next day I decide to go out and do some shopping or something to cheer myself up. Then a guy I once knew from school pulled up in his car next to me and started to harass me. First he told me how pretty I was because I had lost a lot of weight, and then she started telling lies to his friend in the car that we had sex together and I was his girlfriend. I kicked his car door shut before leaving. He yelled "Garfield's dead!" after me because I used to be obsessed with Garfield comics and all the other kids would scream that phrase over and over to me every day at school. But the worst was yet to come. When I came back to my apartment the guy who played his so-called music all night was sitting on the step. He must have drunk about 20 beers and he told me a sob story about his girlfriend dumping him. I told him about how I couldn't sleep last night and asked him to turn his cd player down. He wouldn't listen. This soon escalated into an argument that turned ugly when I held up my fists in a threatening position. He screamed "If you hit me I'm gonna have you arrested for assault!! !" Everything after that was like being in a bad dream. I went inside and he and his sister stated banging on my widow and cursing at me. The landlord was completely on his side. The police did nothing. My parents couldn't do anything because they were too far away. My whole body writhing with fear and anxiety I called the hospital. As the paramedics took me away the guy and his "sister" watched ans went NYA NYA NYA NYA NYAAAA like a couple of 10-year old bullies. Was it just a coincidence that all this was happening to me on 911???

I agree with Sand. This day affected me deeply. I watched it all unfold live as I was getting ready for school. I experienced tremendous shock, sadness, and fear. I remember literally ducking on my college campus as planes flew overhead just an hour after the second tower collapsed. I remember my professor, who was usually very business-like, telling us he had lost a son a few years prior before informing us that classes had been cancelled for the day. My mild-manored husband (who was my fiance at the time) kicked a little old lady out of his store that day for excessive complaining over the temperature of her food. "Not today," he told her. For me, the day was dark and surreal.

Maybe I felt this way because I had friends and family in NYC. Maybe it was because I only lived 200 miles from ground zero at the time. Maybe it was because I remembered my dad taking me to the Twin Towers when I was young and now he's gone too. I don't know. If it had happened on the west coast maybe I'd feel differently.

There's nothing wrong with not getting emotional over a tragedy. After all, no one can tell someone else how to feel. But it is rather disrespectful to go on about TV shows and bad days in light of what others had suffered.

I was working at Microsoft at the time as a game play evaluate on the then unreleased Xbox. I remember vividly that Dead or Alive 3 came in for testing that day, and we'd been looking forward to testing it since the graphics looked amazing. Instead, we arrived to hired security guarding the campus and people wandering the halls in shock, or huddled around the tvs in some of the offices.

In the testing lab we actually made the effort to fire up the game, but it was half hearted at best. We turned several of the TVs to the news and listlessly pushed the buttons on the consoles while watching what was happening. It was interesting that without any prompting from the news yet the name Bin Laden was on everyone's lips already, and talk of retaliation and revenge dominated the conversations. Needless to say, it was one of the strangest workdays I've ever experienced, it certainly made us all feel pretty pointless, working on video games while this sort of thing was going on. I'd say that part lasted about a week, until we got Halo in again and had to really put a lot of hours into the multiplayer mode, that was intense enough that everyone was able to get out of their headspace for the day and focus on the game.