Where where you?

Okay i think it go's here. . So where were you when 9/11 happend?
Me i was 1 and i was in new york cuz my mom lill sis was getin marryed.So we went there for the wedding.Then my grandpa put on the tv and seen what happend.My mom told me this.So don't say you were 1 you can't know that.Sooo where were you guys when 9/11 happend? and sorry if does not go here

 

I was in fifth grade, so I guess I was about 9 or 10. Class had just started and the intercom came on and the principal asked the teachers to turn on the T.V. It was probably a bad idea for us little kids to watch that, but yeah. I freaked the hell out because I had family in New York and to me, at that age, New York was one place, not a big spread out state lol so I worried my family got hurt (thankfully, none of them did).
I got home and my mom was freaking out, asking if I knew what happened.

 

Well, I live in Washington, so I was at school, I think, when it happened.
I said I think, because I'm not sure if it had started yet or not.

Anyway, I was 9 at the time, and I was getting close to my 10th birthday (11/8/2001).
Fox Kids had Digimon showing back then, which is all I cared about.

However, it wasn't a cartoon-only channel, such as Nick, so when the attacks happened and the news interrupted my Digimon, I was furious, since all I cared about then were my cartoons and didn't understand about how events happened in the world sometimes.

Now, though, my sympathy goes to the lives that were lost, as well as families that were affected from a family member's death.

 

10 years ago...
I was playing with my friends... I didn't even dream about something like that might happen.

I was in Brazil, I born there and I was just 3. I don't remember much but I was playing with my friends Hide and Seek.

And you know, tomorrow is my friend birthday. Now I remebered, you can imagine how she is feeling about it? Oo

 

I was in kindergarten, I was five enjoying my first two weeks of being too, thats all I remember. I knew nothing of this until I was around nine.

 

Me senior English teacher that each generation will always have one event that they will remember where they were when it happened and that this is ours. I was in 3rd grade. We were playing bingo but using some sort of building blocks as the pieces. Then a child ran into our classroom telling us to turn on the television. We did and it was a news channel showing footage of the towers falling. Everyone was silent as we watched what was going on. I was annoyed by what was happening because it was ruining the fun I was having playing Bingo.

 

Uh, watching it from my school window in New Jersey. They closed the blinds and resumed class until all the parents came to pick up their kids. I didn't understand what happened though until around fifth grade. It happened in Kindegarten I believe.

 

I was in the school library, picking out a book. Suddenly my mom came into the room and was taking me out of school. It was pretty weird and confusing at the time.

 

I was in like 5th grade or something, at home with my family, watching the news about what was going on. My brother and sister stayed home because of what happened, and that's all I can remember. Just my family in my parent's room, watching the news and seeing what was happening on the news

 

I was either a Freshman or Sophomore in High School. I was in study hall(2nd period) in the library working on some homework when we got the report that a plane had hit the first tower. The televisions were running pretty much the entire schoolday, except one class period where the teacher turned it off citing we needed to get our minds occupied. I remember just being...numb the rest of that day and the day afterward. There was none of the rapid fire cycle of anger/sadness/euphoria there was just...numbness.

I can't believe it's been 11 years since then.

 

I was going upstairs to my room. My sister was watching TV and she suddenly freaked out, shouting at me to come and see this. I was surprised to see that a plane crashed right in the middle of one of the twin towers, but I thought it was the end of it and went on with my daily occupations. When I saw the tower crumbling on the evening news I was like :
"Huh ? What the ... huh ?"
I still am actually, there are so much baffling inconsistencies in the "official" version of those events, so many things flying in the face of common sense that I still don' t know what to think of it, maybe someday I will but I doubt it.

I also recall the destruction of the Berlin wall. I was too young to know what it meant at the time, but it brought my mother to tears, she told us we were watching History.

 

Aw man . . . Where was I . . .

I was only a first grader in Mrs. Robin's first grade class when it happened. I remember one of the other teachers coming into the room when one of our school councilors was reading a story to us.

My dad told me that after the first building went down, he called every event after that just as it was about to happen. My aunt died when the second building fell, she was in New York that week for a business trip, I was so sad . . .

It's pretty crazy that it's already been ten years since all of that has happened.

EDIT: I didn't think of it at first, but as the years past and the anniversaries of it went, I began to realize that the rest of the world existed, that there were other people who didn't live in America, and that some of those people didn't like us. It was a scary thought to know that something so big could fall so easily and cause death and destruction with a flip of a wrist.

 

I was going to be 10 in two weeks. We'd just gotten home from school (my parents had picked me and my sisters up), when my uncle called to turn on BBC, CNN, any news channel. I saw a few minutes of it before my parents sent us to our rooms for the evening. I remember coming down to get a snack right after the second tower got hit, and asking if it was possible that it was an accident, and my dad saying that there was no way it was one. Later, during dinner my mom told us that both towers had collapsed.

The next day we had a swimming class our school arranged, and one of my old teachers was 'supervising'. I remember clearly coming up for breath, and seeing him reading a newspaper that simply said 'Total Destruction'.

I think that was one of the first times I realised that there was pure evil in the world.

 

I was five messing with something in my living room and happened to look at the TV. I knew before my parents had a clue but I was only like 5 or 6 at the time so I didn't really comprehend what was going on. I showed signs of concern because I knew the way the news woman was talking something bad was happening. I didn't know it at the time but it was the first time I would realize just how much chaos is in this world. It was at that moment I began to see things the way I do now.

 

I remember my history teacher saying something like that: "You always remember an event changing everyone's life. Where you are, what you were doing, what you thoughts and feelings were. What the others around you were doing. I remember the Moon landing, the assassination of JFK, and the Berlin Wall." My mom remembers all of them, and me and her 9/11.

I was sleeping in that day, I stayed up late because I had night classes in college. My mom was washing dishes when my brother called. He was supposed to be in New York. Luckily he decided to not go, my mom didn't know why he sounded freaked out, in disbelief. He told her to turn on the tv, she did and went into shock. She started yelling at me from downstairs. She just kept on calling my name, I got up to see what she wanted, and she told me that the world trade center had been hit. I never forgot her next words: "THERE'S SO MANY BODIES!!!"

I ran into my room which had a tv and turned it on, I didn't move from it until that night. When I went to class that night, the teacher tried to make us work, but all we mostly did was talk about what just happened today.

I remember a poem e-mailed from a friend of mine a short time later. The words always strike a cord in me, every description ended with: "May you know peace." It just seems to fit in with everything.

*pulls hat off and bows head* My prayers still go out to the families and their victims, of the courage shown to the firefighters, policemen, and ambulance workers who charged into a building knowing there was a high chance that they'd never make it back out. For them charging back in after the first tower collapsed in the hope of still helping. Of the courage of Flight 93 who managed to overthrow the terrorists in their plane and crash it into a field instead of the White House.

May we never forget.

 

Where was I? I think I was 7 years old and just living my normal life. I was probably playing with some toys or something. I remember going downstairs and my parents being horrified at what had happened, they told me but I just didn't understand at the time what it all meant. It wasn't a very eventful day for me so I don't remember it that well, but now I understand fully and my prayers go out to the people who were affected.

 

I was eight years old and in third grade, middle of social studies class in New Jersey. All of a sudden another teacher came in and said something to our teacher, and while that happened a few of my friends and I that were sitting near the window saw the smoke. We didn't know what the hell was going on, we though it was a fire or something but it wasn't like anything we'd ever seen.
Minutes later the principal came over the loudspeaker and evacuated the school; the entire school was outside and that's when we saw the magnitude of whatever was going on. Never in my life have I seen anything like that and I know it's an image I won't ever forget. There's something so haunting about seeing thick black smoke against a pure blue sky, even though I didn't know what happened I knew something was definitely wrong. I could hear sirens faintly, too - though I don't know if those were local or from Ground Zero.
Everyone's parents came pretty quickly to pick their kids up, it was on the way home I learned about what happened. My parents gave me a brief explanation but had the radio on in the car.

It was a few days after that the full scale of it all hit my class. Some of my friends had parents that would've been on one of the flights but weren't due to strange flukes - one got sick, one decided to cancel a meeting - but there were people in my school that did lose a parent, and that was pretty big because we were a school of grades K-8 and only had about 200 students. Teachers lost friends...school didn't continue normally for a few days because of all this. In the end, I nearly lost my stepmother (she worked in a building close to the ones that collapsed) and some friends are gone.

 

I was eight years old sitting in class doing math work when a teacher walked in and told us to turn on the tv. When I saw the building fall, I was mad. My first thoughts were that "People will be sad on my birthday tomorrow." I think we got to leave school early that day. I didn't know the ramifications of what had transpired until a day or two later.

 

I remember I was in the second grade. We were coming back from lunch, when another teacher came in, and told the teacher to turn on the news. We watched silently for a few minutes, and the principle came on the loud speaker, telling the teachers to turn off the TV's, that it was a distraction to what was supposed to be taught in the classroom.
I came home from school that day, walking off the bus, my Mom waiting for me on the end of my long driveway. That was the first time she's hugged me tight in a long time.

 

REST IN PEACE
(by Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh)

I am a World Trade Center tower, standing tall in the clear blue sky, feeling a violent blow in my side, and
I am a towering inferno of pain and suffering imploding upon myself and collapsing to the ground.
May I rest in peace.

I am a terrified passenger on a hijacked airplane not knowing where we are going or that I am riding on fuel tanks that will be instruments of death, and
I am a worker arriving at my office not knowing that in just a moment my future will be obliterated.
May I rest in peace.

I am a pigeon in the plaza between the two towers eating crumbs from someone's breakfast when fire rains down on me from the skies, and
I am a bed of flowers admired daily by thousands of tourists now buried under five stories of rubble.
May I rest in peace.

I am a firefighter sent into dark corridors of smoke and debris on a mission of mercy only to have it collapse around me, and
I am a rescue worker risking my life to save lives who is very aware that I may not make it out alive.
May I rest in peace.

I am a survivor who has fled down the stairs and out of the building to safety who knows that nothing will ever be the same in my soul again,and
I am a doctor in a hospital treating patients burned from head to toe who knows that these horrible images will remain in my mind forever.
May I know peace.

I am a tourist in Times Square looking up at the giant TV screens thinking I'm seeing a disaster movie as I watch the Twin Towers crash to the ground, and
I am a New York woman sending e-mails to friends and family letting them know that I am safe.
May I know peace.

I am a piece of paper that was on someone's desk this morning and now I'm debris scattered by the wind across lower Manhattan, and
I am a stone in the graveyard at Trinity Church covered with soot from the buildings that once stood proudly above me, death meeting death.
May I rest in peace.

I am a dog sniffing in the rubble for signs of life, doing my best to be of service, and
I am a blood donor waiting in line to make a simple but very needed contribution for the victims.
May I know peace.

I am a resident in an apartment in downtown New York who has been forced to evacuate my home, and
I am a resident in an apartment uptown who has walked 100 blocks home in a stream of other refugees.
May I know peace.

I am a family member who has just learned that someone I love has died, and
I am a pastor who must comfort someone who has suffered a heartbreaking loss.
May I know peace.

I am a loyal American who feels violated and vows to stand behind any military action it takes to wipe terrorists off the face of the earth, and
I am a loyal American who feels violated and worries that people who look and sound like me are all going to be blamed for this tragedy.
May I know peace.

I am a frightened city dweller who wonders whether I'll ever feel safe in a skyscraper again, and
I am a pilot who wonders whether there will ever be a way to make the skies truly safe.
May I know peace.

I am the owner of a small store with five employees that has been put out of business by this tragedy, and
I am an executive in a multinational corporation who is concerned about the cost of doing business in a terrorized world.
May I know peace.

I am a visitor to New York City who purchases postcards of the World Trade Center Twin Towers that are no more, and
I am a television reporter trying to put into words the terrible things I have seen.
May I know peace.

I am a boy in New Jersey waiting for a father who will never come home, and
I am a boy in a faraway country rejoicing in the streets of my village because someone has hurt the hated Americans.
May I know peace.

I am a general talking into the microphones about how we must stop the terrorist cowards who have perpetrated this heinous crime, and
I am an intelligence officer trying to discern how such a thing could have happened on American soil, and
I am a city official trying to find ways to alleviate the suffering of my people.
May I know peace.

I am a terrorist whose hatred for America knows no limit and I am willing to die to prove it, and
I am a terrorist sympathizer standing with all the enemies of American capitalism and imperialism, and
I am a master strategist for a terrorist group who planned this abomination. My heart is not yet capable of openness, tolerance, and loving.
May I know peace.

I am a citizen of the world glued to my television set, fighting back my rage and despair at these horrible events, and
I am a person of faith struggling to forgive the unforgivable, praying for the consolation of those who have lost loved ones,
calling upon the merciful beneficence of God/Yahweh/Allah/Spirit/Higher Power.
May I know peace.

I am a child of God who believes that we are all children of God and we are all part of each other.
May we all know peace

Amen, So May it Be, And so it is.

And I add my personal prayer to this:
May love open the hearts of every sentient being and bring us to the ultimate understanding that we are truly brothers and sisters, born of the same divine
creative source, and in this way may we all find understanding, compassion, love and peace.

Love, light and blessings to you....

~*~

That's the poem I was sent. Even now it brings tears to my eyes.

I remember that night, Tom Brokaw broke down openly sobbing. The power went out for an hour or so in New York. He said during that time he called his wife and child to let them know he was okay. He told everyone right after that to call their families and let them know that you were okay. He was crying when he said that. Even now, I remember him doing that.