9/11

So many articles.  So many words.  So many thoughts.  So many lives destroyed.

The tenth anniversary of something – anything – else probably wouldn’t cause such an out-pouring of media frenzy as the anniversary of “9/11” does.  It does, and it makes sense that it does.  Even the over-the-top coverage is forgiveable.

I guess it’s because something new, unexpected, unimagined, random and absolutely awful was delivered to a huge number of people who would usually expect nothing awful to happen in their life, and even those who weren’t caught-up in it directly were caught-up in it just by watching.

Nearly three thousand were killed that day, and each one of those has fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, lovers, close friends, colleagues, left behind with the pain, grieving, and lives changed forever.  How many were affected in total?  It must run into hundreds of thousands if not millions.

Fortunately for me, I was not directly affected, but I watched it unfold via mainstream media and so, like everybody else, got caught up in the emotion and complete shock of it all.

Actually, when it happened, I was at work in an underground radio production place, and I recall first hearing about it from somebody who’d been upstairs for an afternoon cigarette break and had just heard about the first plane hitting the first tower. We then listened to the radio as the news of the second plane came through.

Because we had no tv, I recall desperately trying but failing to find streaming video of it on the net as every news server had crashed or was running slow because the whole world had had the same idea and was also trying to watch it at the same time.

The actual enormity of it all only sunk in once I got home and watched the endless replays of the footage on Sky News.

I recall an 18 year old work experience girl who was with us.  Sadly, I can’t recall her name.  She’d been with us for about two weeks or so, probably doing two days a week or something.  She was over in Europe on some very expensive educational trip, which included ‘working’ in different places.  She used to spend most of her day sitting at a computer typing the fastest I’d ever seen anybody type into five or six MSN chat windows (remember when social networking meant just MSN?  2001 was way before Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc., etc.) chatting to friends and family back home in Manhattan or in other parts of Europe on the same educational trip she was on.

She wasn’t working that day, and we never saw her again.  We did eventually hear that she had been directly affected by the attack and had lost some family members, and, as soon as she could, had been flown back to America.  So, I’m guessing she was the nearest I personally got to ‘knowing’ somebody who was directly affected. I felt so very sorry for her.  She seemed to have the whole world ahead of her and was nice and just ordinary.

I’m guessing that ‘nice and just ordinary’ is a fair description of those who were killed, their families, and their loved ones. They weren’t soldiers in a battlefield, nor were they individuals who’d been targeted and hunted down for anything they’d personally done.  They were just people who happened to be in a place which somebody else had decided should be attacked.  It’s almost a random selection, which I guess makes it hurt so badly for those who are left behind trying to make some sense of it all.

So, for those who are hurting on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, may you find peace.