Anyone else college aged or older when it happened? Gosh this thread is making me feel old....
I was in the working world in 2001, and I had a seminar scheduled for 9:00CDT that day.
It was a very disjointed day. I was at work, when I overheard my boss mention that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. While I was driving to the seminar, I was listening to NPR; they were getting the Pentagon's reaction to the events in NYC, and in the middle of the report the reporter mentioned that the fire alarms had just started going off. The seminar went on as scheduled, but it was interrupted in the middle when one of the secretaries interrupted the talk to let us know that one of the towers had fallen. Finally, the seminar was just cancelled, and I found a TV in their break room, where I saw the first images of the day, which looked like a war zone in Lower Manhattan.
Afterwards, I spent about a day in shock, like everyone else, but then I think my reaction started to diverge from the norm. Most people were trying to cope with the idea that someone could hate them just for being part of a particular group (i.e., Americans), but as a gay man I had already long ago come to terms with the idea. It took me a long time to realize that I had missed something fundamental in the experience of the rest of the population.
Poll
