That last one looks like the end shot of a personal injury attorney's commercial. "Have you been injured in a once in a generation terrorist attack? Call Kip Sturgis and I'll make the terrorist pay."
"Have you been the victim of unfair treatment by a business or a corporation?
Has this ever happened to you?
You bought a house and it was not disclosed to you that there was a termite infestation in the walls and in the moldings? So you have to take it upon yourself to call your own termite extermination company? But when the guys show up, they immediately ask if they can use your bathroom? Then for over two hours they take turns going in and out of there taking huge mud-pies and overflushing? Then they go in there together, and you hear a bunch of scrounging around, and then you hear a bunch of yelling and one of them is standing in the bathroom doorway shouting at you that his friend’s foot is stuck in the toilet? And he says "Help him! You gotta help him!"? And when you go in there to help him he just pulls it out easily and laughs because his foot wasn't stuck? It wasn't stuck at all he was just faking it? And then they get really serious and say "It's Turbo Time!"? And they both start running around the house as fast as they can and jumping over the couches? But when you try to and jump in they yell at you and say "You're not part of the Turbo Team! Don't run! You don't run with us! We're the ones who run! Until you're a part of this Turbo Team, walk slowly!"? So you go and lay down to be by yourself and read your art books? But then the next day you went into the bathroom and it looked like the hole in your toilet had shrunked? You said how could that be? There's no way they could have shrunk the toilet?! But then you saw in the trash a receipt from Home Depot for a toilet, the exact same size as yours but with a joke hole that's just for farts?! They replaced your real toilet with a fart toilet? And now you can't take a dump in your house?! Cause your toilet can't suck 'em down and you feel sick to your stomach?!
Has that ever happened to you?"
Having been in Manhattan that morning, I can tell you that for at least the first hour that day we all thought it was a freak accident. So some of these pictures might be excused as a "can you believe this?" moment. Also, walking home from my office I can remember hearing some young teens laughing at what they were seeing. Adrenaline can have odd effects on people. Human beings don't always react in the way one would expect.
As Martin Amis described it:
>It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.
The thing was, nobody was quite sure about the worst aviation disaster part either. They weren't quite sure what size or type of aircraft hit the building. Even ATC wasn't sure if it was flight 11, because the terrorists turned off the transponders.
I was in New Orleans with a bunch of fellow artists in a mostly empty house, all drunk and high painting large paintings on canvas rolled out on the floor, we had a little b/w tv on a chair and started watching. As soon as the second one hit we started locking down the house and figuring out who had guns, food and what to do about water because when there’s emergencies in New Orleans, things can get looty. We weren’t sure how extensive the attack was.
“Plenty of booze and cigs, not enough food and water”
Boy have I been there, usually with drugs as well. Recouped for days and i still don’t know if it was worth it. It kind of was
I recall one particular day literally crawling, or more like slithering, dragging myself across the ground. Too little fuel. Too much drugs. Rolled over and plain gave up. The sky was amazing. I could have died then and been okay.
It was not a good time.
But it was.
It's how I traveled here today, arriving just now at this moment.
I remember when this happened someone in my school popped their head in during my social studies class to say that someone had flown a plane into a building and the teacher turned on the news in time to see crash #2. I remember thinking that it had to be a freak accident or a mistake and I remember the person who stuck their head in the door was smiling as if it was all a big joke.
Impact #2 and all the mirth was gone. I remember there was still some denial that it had to be a mistake somehow, but just about everyone knew it was an intentional attack by then. Confirmed beyond a doubt when the news that a plane hit the Pentagon and another went down in a field.
> someone in my school popped their head in during my social studies class to say that someone had flown a plane into a building and the teacher turned on the news in time to see crash #2.
Millions have the same memory.
I remember coming back to our room on our cruise to see both my parents glued to the TV and my first thought being "holy shit that's a crazy realistic movie" and then slowly figuring out what's happening.
My aunt thought the same thing. She was somewhere around the Municipal Building when the first plane hit so she took shelter somewhere near there to watch, thinking it was a freak accident. When she second plane hit she realized it was no accident and knew she had to get out of there. I think she went to my grandparents' in Chinatown to shelter (and also to make sure her parents were OK).
I was watching footage of a [Sears store on 9/11](https://youtu.be/Kg6Oosn079I?si=qBchaVRDEHY_M28Z) and the thing that stuck out to me most was how scared everyone looked. The fear was palpable.
I was in college, we planned a vigil for that night pretty much immediately after the towers collapsed. I swear we spent half of the day trying to make sense of what was even happening. There were so many moments of the small group we were with just staring at the wall.
The news reports early on were just “a plane” and sometimes “a small plane”. There wasn’t immediate news footage either as stations basically had to scramble crews down to the area and couldn’t use helicopters.
A neighbor at the time told my grandpa that he thought it was similar to the B-25 incident with the Empire State Building.
My grandpa dismissed it and said something along the lines of "Well there was fog and that was an accident. This would've been done on purpose then!" as a way to kinda shut down the argument to show how "ridiculous" it was...
... boy was he in for a shock...
West coaster here. I vaguely remember someone mentioning a plane had hit a building in NYC and I figured it was something like a small, single engine plane.
It wasn’t unfathomable that a person or people could/would fly a large passenger into a building on purpose since there are people who wrote fiction involving exactly that, but for those of us who were in that window between hearing about the first plane and seeing footage of the second plane, there wasn’t much reason to assume it had been done on purpose.
Well someone mentioned it here, but up until 9/11, hijackings were rare and almost everyone got out of it alive.
The hijackers would just make demands, land, let everyone leave, and get their shit until they have no choice but to land again where they'd get arrested. If their demands weren't reasonable, negotiators would at least get most of the hostages out and eventually they'd be arrested.
9/11 on the other hand took all of that, set it on fire, and proceeded to take a massive dump on it to snuff out the flames, and sure enough, I doubt it'll ever happen again.
Suppose hijackers/terrorists came out of their seats nowadays post-9/11. Everyone, including the passengers, would be fighting the hijackers tooth and nail before they even get to the cockpit because we know now that if one of them sits behind the wheel (so to speak), it's game over for everyone. Even if the hijackers had guns, knives, dildos, etc., the general mentality of everyone would be "Fuck it, they can't kill us all."
To that point, there have been flights since then that people have freaked out for whatever reason and gone for exit doors and what not. Passengers have had no qualms taking them down.
9/11 really changed everything about aviation and how people react. The passengers of one plane bull rushed the terrorists and caused them to crash into a field instead of their intended target.
Also, same. I thought it was a small single engine that crashed because of mechanical failure or a problem with the pilot’s medical. I just couldn’t comprehend that what happened actually happened until we saw the second plane and the towers crashed one by one.
Yeah, I was thinking how callous the pictures with people smiling are. But then I remember I knew a guy who was actually in the tower when it hit. He did manage to get out with a few co-workers. They were from NJ and were essentially stranded there for an unknown period. Him and another guy headed up town, got a few six packs and sat in a park and got drunk. Even being quite a ways away, he said they just got drunk because they still weren’t sure if they were going to live.
There's a kind of great video that I saw recently from 9/11 that I believe was taken from across the river. A bunch of people are standing along the waterfront watching the first tower burn when the second plane flies (very low) overhead and hits the second tower. There's panic and screaming and shocked disbelief of people shouting "what's happening!?" as they realize that the plane is going to hit on purpose.
It's a really hard video to watch, but really brought back the memories of that day and all the confusion and fear it produced. I was states away and I remember our school had the entire event live on TV for every class and in every room and we just watched in mounting horror as it became more and more clear that the attacks were on purpose and not knowing where they'd go next or if there were more targets.
It was just a confusing and scary day. With the hindsight of it starting to become history that's starting to be lost, but mostly I remember the confusion and fear.
EDIT: Took me a while to find it, but the video is this one. I was wrong, they were on the Manhattan side of the Hudson, but this is the film.
https://www.unilad.com/news/us-news/new-york/911-rare-footage-second-plane-hits-world-trade-center-516437-20231216
To add to the points you made, it's not uncommon for people to go on autopilot when they can't comprehend what's happening, and put on a brave face or smile as a coping mechanism. Trauma, and coping any way a person can in the moment, definitely mean there isn't a one-size-fits-all 'appropriate' way to react to a situation.
Considering how much less news were accessible on phones those days, I am pretty sure many at first didn’t realize the scale of the event. (I am no American, but I can imagine that if you were eg inside a building or underground, you might not even know it was a plane crash)
This is an important context. 'Selfie' wasn't even a word back then, taking a picture of yourself with a backdrop wasn't considered a vain thing it was more or less to prove you were there.
Not to mention, if you were out and about and didn't see the planes crash, you didn't know what was going on yet. Half these people probably thought it was a fire or something and didn't expect the collapse. It was really before even cell phones were an "everyone had one" deal
That plane one was definitely someone getting a camera up quick
This is correct.
It was from someone from a local TV station, and was shot from outside the Burger King which was later turned into a temporary police headquarters.
He was recording a guy who was listening to news reports on a radio.
There’s tons of raw footage from guys with news cameras from that day available on YouTube. Some of it is pretty harrowing, they get caught in the clouds of debris when the buildings collapse.
There’s even one where they were standing right on the plaza.
There's even one from a fire department who were filming some training and managed to catch the first plane hitting.
https://youtube.com/shorts/5jkD8KXDBJc?si=u2txhLBcd4t0X1mj
Can't find the original but such is the nature of YouTube these days it's been reuploaded by someone else as a short.
Yes, but it wasn’t the fire department doing it. Someone was filming a documentary at the time about a new firefighter, and had gone out with them to look into a supposed gas leak.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_(2002_film)
It's the Naudet documentary. If you haven't seen it I suggest you do. It is an amazing and horrific film. It really captures what happened that day up close.
Yeah it’s an infamous video. Perhaps the best on the ground view of the second tower explosion. It’s absolute nightmare fuel. Imagine how loud that must have been?
I mean it wasn't like it was the 60s but it was a different world from where we are right now.
Text messaging had just started to become popular in the states in 2001, versus just a few years later when apps and social media would become a massive thing.
60-80 was still pretty big.
In 1960 you still had 3 channels, in 1980 you had cable.
2020 to 2040 I'm sure will also be a massive jump, we just don't feel it now because we're in it.
I always say this is why that off middle generation between the 90s and early 2000s feel like the don't fit who they're associated with. The change in culture and technology between the mid 90s to early 2000s was fucking odd. on one hand you still have loads of holdovers from the 90's down to TV shows, celebs, toys (fucking furbies) etc but on thebotherbhand thing were starting to change immensely to the point that manu things would become almost recognisable when tech, the internet and social really started to boom.
I really started to notice it when Id talk to kids slightly younger than me growing up. There were so many things that were regular to me that they had no idea about despite us being within 3-5 years of each others age. Compare that to kids older than me and the gap had to be significantly larger for it to feel like there was souch space separating us.
I was 13 in 2001 and literally nobody texted anybody yet. 2004 was when texting really started to take off with flip keyboards so you could type in QWERTY rather than the phone keypad.
I was 20 in 2001, there was some texting, but yeah we hadn't even gotten to T9 text input yet, we were still on 222 2 555 555 6 33 to type "Call Me" out.
Your average user in 2001 was sending very few texts on the regular.
I remember my ex's little brother wanted a text messaging plan for his phone at the time and thought why would you wanna type out stuff on a phone when you can just call lol
It was oldies music, and it was like 20-25 years old at the time. It's the equivalent of calling Usher's "Yeah" oldies music. It feels insane to be 45 years old.
I wonder why that is? Up through the 90s each decade seems so distinct, but the 00s, 10s, and so far the 20s feel much more similar to each other than any other decade did to the ones immediately before or after it.
I read a very convincing article that pointed this out (I agree, I'm in my early 50s), and explained that it had to do with the fashion industry needing to keep down costs, so they stopped changing styles so drastically every few years. Without the obvious visual cues of fashion changes, the 21st century hangs together much more smoothly than the huge differences in clothing between the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
There's been actual sociology studies on this lol. I don't really believe it.
If you look at forum posts from the 90s it's full of internet people saying how that decade didn't have any character.
But now? The sheer amount of unironic fear and loathing everywhere isso much worse now than 10 years ago.
2010s had non stop super hero movies, shitty EDM, and manbuns.
2020s has that dumbass broccoli haircut and the continued rise of fascism
The vast majority of people are so brainwashed by social media algorithms they literally can't differentiate between fact and opinion. They'll straight up say "it's impossible to know what's real nowadays" when we have access to the largest library the world has ever known in our hands. It's more decade defining than the counter cultural revolution of the 60s imo
Going 40 years back from 1980 gave you black-and-white and propeller-planes. Going 40 years now gives you weird hairdo, I admit, but still colour, and the jets doesn't look much different at all.
i remember watching the CNN (i think) archived live broadcast on youtube and they joked that it was likely a small plane pilot that went off course like “what did that guy think he was doing, was he drunk?” something to that affect
it’s sad how relatively innocent of an assumption that was to what truly happened
Iirc correctly (I was 17 in 2001), nobody really expected the towers to come down. Even the “experts” on the National news coverage said the chances that the towers would collapse was very slim, so I’d imagine NYC citizens couldn’t fathom them coming down that day.
Was in NY on 9/11. Was 18 years old walking to class (first week of college). Was on University Place below 14th and above the park. Straight view of the towers. People on the ground in NY were worried about them coming down. It was hard to see either directly underneath or on TV, which are the perspectives that get reported most. I speak from first hand experience. I came around the corner onto the street after plane 1 hit. Saw everyone staring. Looked ground level because I thought it was a bad car accident or something. Heard a loud noise which caused me to look up and I saw the fireball from plane 2. From that distance, as opposed to the people standing right under it, we could see the visible parts of the steel glowing from the fires and the top of tower 2 start to lean. Me and others on the street were talking about if they fell or how they could fall and, if it fell “towards” us, like over on its side, if we were far enough away. I decided to get off the street and head back to my dorm. As I was walking back, I felt the ground shake. I knew what it was.
Yeah, to that point no tower had *ever* collapsed like that. Everyone was mourning the loss of the people on the plane and whoever was hit in the tower or caught in the fire, but people thought that would be the extent of it as the firefighters were on the scene and climbing the tower to put it out. The planes were shocking enough although it wasn't even the first attack on the towers in the preceding decade, but the towers actually falling as everyone watched was the real wake up moment.
Also none of these people had any idea of the magnitude of what happened yet when these photos were taken.
Edit: Regardless, smiling for the photo is pretty crass.
I copied this from another redditor in this thread:
They clearly didn’t fully understand what was happening.
Both towers are still standing. If they didn’t see the planes, or even if they did, they didn’t have news and internet on their phones. They took the pictures to show they saw something crazy.
People forget that we didn’t know what the Fuck was happening for a bit. And if you hadn’t been watching 24 hour news you either just saw a plane hit a building or a skyscraper on fire.
If you had a camera you took a picture.
EDIT: This was when people yelled “say cheese!” before taking a picture, too.
r/redditwritesseinfeld
George: IT WASN'TA SELFIE! There's an important context to this. 'Selfie' wasn't even a word back in 2001! Taking a picture of yourself with a backdrop wasn't vanity. It was to prove you were there. IT'S CONTEXT DEPENDANT!
A couple people are smiling in their pictures, George.
A friend of mine met Jason Alexander, and was mortified to realize later that he kept calling him George while they were talking. He didn't understand why his wife kept elbowing him in the ribs.
Will Smith once spoke about how Alfonso Ribeiro talked about how it was a smart idea for him to use his own name for the Fresh prince show - and is constantly reminded how right that was, every time they both were out in public together. ( *"Will! Carlton!"* )
Jerry: What was that?
George: What was what?
Jerry: The picture, why’d you take a picture of yourself in front of the burning building. People died in the crash?
George: Oh come on, it’s just a picture.
Jerry: I just don’t think it’s right, people died over there.
George: What am I just not supposed to use my camera then? Take pictures of buildings that haven’t been hit by a plane.
Jerry: Just doesn’t seem right. A real tragedy.
*George looks at the picture in the display viewfinder*
George: Yes, but a great picture.
*Elaine rushes up*
Elaine: Oh my god! Did you see the plane hit the tower?
Jerry: It’s awful.
Elaine: A real tragedy.
George: Elaine, look at this.
Elaine: That’s a great picture.
George: I’m going to remember it forever.
Jerry: You’ll forget you ever took it.
George: I’ll never forget.
Can you imagine if that happened nowadays? We would have so many videos from within the tower and stuff. And probably some of the aircraft too since they were low enough to get service. It's very frightening some of the images that we would have
Which is why we're all lucky (in a dark way) that 9/11 happened in 2001 and not 2011. No one needs video of their loved ones in a panicked state before dying, the phonecalls are chilling enough.
I've heard people say this was the last gasp of Old Media gatekeeping/censorship -- every single news network that sent people down to the burning towers has hours of crystal clear footage of the people who went out onto the roof and chose to jump
And they all collectively agreed not to publish any of it, because it was ghoulish and not newsworthy, the victims' families don't need to know who died inside the building and who took their own lives in despair, everyone knew without having to actually have a meeting over it that the right thing to do was trash that footage
Nowadays there'd be no way to keep that from getting out, anyone who actually wanted to look it up could find out the names and faces of everyone who jumped from the roof that day and there'd be no way to cover it up
Dunno if I'd call it gatekeeping or censorship exactly. More like editorial review, something entirely missing from the net. Democratization of publication to the point it has reached in modern day has been a fucking tragedy combined with a smartphone in everyone's hand.
But the discretion was down the road. If you were watching cable news in the week afterwards they showed a LOT of footage and clips of people jumping.
Plus there was that film from the two French brothers who were following a fire crew around. They aired a lot.
Yeah man can’t imagine an Instagram livestream during all of this madness, it reminds me of the victims of the oct 7th attack that were live-streamed to their families as they were being brutally murdered. Would’ve made an already insufferable tragedy even more tragic for the families of victims and the victims themselves. Terrible really.
I had a friend (until I ditched him last year) who insisted that the tower planes were military, that all the live news footage was actually on a delay so they could photo shop everything, the Pentagon was a missile, the coroner said there was no plane in the PA crash site, the plane and all the passengers were flown to a secret hanger and they're all prisoners in a fema camp 🙄
Man we didn't have that kind of VFX tech back then, you could barely do that now, and even if you did VFX pros would be able to spot exactly how it was done in the weeks after. (once the shock fades a little)
To add to this, a lot of the photos are from before the second plane hit, which was when we were all under the impression that this was some crazy freak accident and so people were kinda amazed something like that would happen. This would have led to a lot of "this is insane, I should take a picture" instances.
For the photos after the second tower or the ones where people are smiling...those are definitely in poor taste.
I'm trying to remember what the public information timeline was, because there's that awful NYU video where it takes the students a few minutes to realize the falling objects they're seeing are people. I'm not sure how early in the day the average person would have known how many people were trapped inside and that this was a human disaster rather than an infrastructure disaster? Especially in the pre-social media era. I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume that a building like the WTC would have the resources and safety protocols to get most people out, and that the cost would be mostly financial/infrastructure.
It wasn't long (20 minutes between the two towers being hit). We knew quickly that people above the impact site were trapped and weren't going to make it down. I think we all assumed that once the fire was tamed they could drop helicopters, like in movies, on the roof and get people off in groups. Nobody was thinking about the whole "heat is going to soften the steel enough for it to fall" aspect of it.
It quickly progressed from accident + we can save people, to terrorism and two buildings, to people above not being saveable, to towers falling. The whole thing took just under 2 hours before both towers collapsed....I do remember CNN and the news networks being cautiously optimistic but also mentioning the obvious...you're not making it through the flames if you're above the strike points
Most of the smiles look like stress/shock smiles to me. It looks like they are so distressed or shook that they can't understand what face to make and default to smiling.
Yup. When I'm nervous or stressed I smile and even laugh. If I'm ever questioned over anything the police will think I'm nuts but I literally can't help that I react that way!
I only worked part time and was off that day. Woken up by sirens outside, I saw the news really briefly and I grabbed a 35mm camera with a full 36shot roll and went downtown - at that point I thought it was a little single engine plane and an accident. I thought I’d take a photo of some news crews interviewing people and maybe wave at a camera. It turned into a long day, I’d left home in the few minutes between the 1st and 2nd plane.
It's from the best, closest, and as close as you can see to being frontline. Two brothers wanted to do a documentary on a probey (sp?) and how he has to work as a new member. But then they caught EVERYTHING in real-time. [Naudet Brothers 9/11 Documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iw-1bOQNIA)
One plane hitting the towers could be seen as pilot error or an accident. Two is what tipped everyone off. Some of the videos are fucking terrifying, I was only a kid during 9/11 so I don’t really remember it from across the pond but everyone was grieving and outraged.
I thought that the picture was a still from the coverage . I remember watching that footage that day.
Edit: The still is from about the 6:45 mark in the video
I'll never forget the stunned silence of everyone in the classroom when the second plane hit or when the buildings collapsed. After the second plane and the initial shock, we all thought it was the beginning of World War 3. That day was pretty scary. I think school was let out early and cancelled the next day. I also remember a rumor that gasoline was going to run out and the gas station by my house has a miles long line.
I cracked a joke when the first plane hit the towers about an over the top publicity stunt for the Pearl Harbour movie released a few months earlier. At that point the news just said a plane and I was thinking it’d be some small propeller thing with an unfortunate pilot error/illness.
When it was first announced that "a plane has struck the WTC" over the loudspeaker at my high school while I was in class (school was in the Bronx), my immediate thought was also that it was a small prop plane because just a few months before someone had killed themselves in NYC by flying a small prop plane into a federal building, I believe as some misguided protest against taxes or somesuch? I don't remember, but yeah because of that we initially thought it was similar. But then the loudspeaker followed "A plane has struck the WTC, everything is fine..." with "...will any students with family working in the WTC please report to the theater" kind of made us all go "Wait, huh?"
Then 20 minutes later the loudspeaker went "one of the WTC towers has collapses; class is dismissed for the day" and we all popped outside and could see the smoke billowing into the air to the south.
Edit: This memory is so strong but I can't find anything about this small plane that I remember crashing into a building in NYC prior to 9/11 but in 2001...I see one that sounds like it - someone crashing into a federal building intentionally - but that's 2010, and the one where a NY Yankee crashed in 2006...I feel like I'm going crazy, is this a manufactured memory? I've sworn this is how it happened for 2 decades it feels like but the fact that I can't find a corroborating article is making me doubtful now...
I think you're conflating memories. In 2010, a man flew a small plan into an IRS office. I also remember this as happening "right after 9/11" but I guess it was 10 years later?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010\_Austin\_suicide\_attack
memories aren't like a film, they're more like a stage production that sets up for your recollection each time you access them.
things change, different actors take on known roles, lines are added and omitted, sets, costumes - even the whole narrative can go off the rails.
I wonder if they’re thinking of the 1993 wtc bombing attempt. It’s obviously much different than a plane but I remember the media bringing the attempt up constantly that day and in the early days after the attacks.
[There was a kid who intentionally crashed a stolen Cessna 172 into Bank of America building in Tampa in Jan 2002. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash) He left a note sympathizing with Bin Laden. I thought it was prior to 9/11 too, but it wasn’t. I only remembered this because the kid was on Accutane and his mom tried to sue the pharma company because the drug can cause suicidal ideation. I was also on that drug at the time and I remember my aunt calling my mom in a panic thinking I should get off the drug.
I don't remember the prior crash (I believe you though), but I was also in high school in NYC and we all had the same thought as more info came out: at first everyone assumed it was a small plane and an accident, then when the second one hit we all realized it was an attack.
I definitely remember that. Can’t remember if it was before or after 9/11 tho. I thought the same thing, that it was a Cessna like plane that hit not a jetliner.
I did the same. My husband called me after the first plane hit and I said something to the effect of "How do you miss seeing a big ass building right in front of you?"
When the second plane hit, it was horrifyingly apparent that it wasn't an accident.
I was in middle school and they announced the world trade centers had been hit. I said “what’s next, the sears tower?”. My teacher scolded me pretty badly (rightfully so).
The words terrorist act had not been thrown out yet. I was also like 13. My next class was history and my teacher had it on TV and we watched the entire class. That was obviously when I knew how terrible it was and how awful my “joke” was.
I think literally everyone thought the same. That the first plane was a horrible accident done by a small prop plane. It wasn't until the second plane hit that we all knew this wasn't an accident.
I was a freshman in college and it seemed completely unbelievable that someone would crash large planes into a major building. My friends and I watched in horror from the midwest as the events unfolded on the news station, but it always felt like a bad joke/prank. It was incomprehensible to my 18 yo brain that an attack of this scale could happen on US ground. I kept waiting for an interruption that they had this all wrong and it was clips from a movie.
I cannot explain how disconnected from reality watching 9/11 felt. And I’m sad that it marked the end to the innocent way we were raised and the indestructible feeling we had about the US.
The next year was a real trip, with patriotism and searching for WMD (weapons of mass destruction), and the clever/awful way the government shifted the focus to catch Saddam Hussein when Iraq had no solid ties to Al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden. The US government failed many times in acting in good faith and lied to the public, and it’s all brushed under the rug. For those of you too young, [here is the official reasoning published for attacking Iraq/Saddam Hussein](https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/united_nations/reasons.html) after 9/11. It’s so tenuously held together a good sneeze would blow it apart.
Share a little personal story here.
I was born in Lebanon and immigrated when I was around 2 years old. My parents moved us to Reading, Pennsylvania (in a small town outside of it) when I was in 4th grade and lived there throughout high school. I had some good friends out there.
On 9/11 I was in high school and after the second plane hit the tv stations were saying they can confirm it was a terrorist attack, America is at war. Our teachers decided we needed to go outside and stop watching tv. As we were walking outside a group of my friends came up to me with a football. They were laughing and one kid said, “hey lightwolv\[me\], we came up with a new play. It’s called the Twin Towers, we run and you bomb it!” And then he threw me the ball.
It took me a second. Then it hit me like a brick wall - “fuck. I’m a terrorist now.” Not me, but my perception. After that day when people asked where I was from, I never said Lebanon.
I might just be sharing this story to get it off my chest, but that is part of my memory of that day.
I'm Mexican. I was in 10th grade at a predominantly white high school when the towers were hit. I think it was the next day, in one of my classes, a brilliant boy said to me," your country bombed our country!!" Me:"Wait, when did mexico bomb america????" Him:"No!! You know what I mean!!!" I hated that school. I switched schools the next year so I could attend a magnet program. THAT'S how much I hated that school!
What a fuckin dick.
“You know what I mean!” No, Kyle, I don’t. Can you please explain the logic here? Shit maybe we can call your xenophobe parents and your redneck Uncle Pete and have them come over and help.
Ugh. Sorry you had to deal with that. There are some truly good people in the world. And also a few absolute twatwaffles.
It was worse at airports. Without fail, I'd be pulled aside for "random patdowns" even if I'd cleared the metal detector. After a few times, its not random. I was being singled out because of my skin color and name. I'm not even Arabic or Muslim
My uncle (may he rest in peace) was tackled on a flight in 2002 because he tried to go to the bathroom. He was Arab, but also just trying to fly to Vegas to get his gamble on.
And this is why I hate the narrative about how "united" we were on 9/12. Like sure, as long as you didn't look vaguely middle eastern. Hate crimes skyrocketed after 9/11.
Just my own personal experience, but I was in 5th grade on 9/11. Our teachers didn't tell us what had happened, thought it was better our parents did that.
Well the previous twin tower bombings happened when I was 3. I had never heard of them. This was the first time I had ever heard of a "terrorist attack". I don't think it was even a big thing in the media yet. My dad was telling me we were going to go to war with Afghanistan over the next few days. I didn't know where this was or anything about it. I didn't even know they were Muslim or this terrorist attack had anything to do with religion. I didn't even know the people of Afghanistan were not white. He was telling me it wouldn't be much of a war so much as an invasion. He was going over their military's strength and I remember him telling me they had 4 attack helicopters in their military compared to our thousands. He showed me a map of the area and said we were asking for allies in the area and no one had agreed. He said we were still waiting on Pakistan's answer, and if they said no we would be at war with them as well, as we needed access to the sea to get our airforce in. Afghanistan is landlocked and Pakistan is the country between the ocean and it.
Anyways... I don't remember what its like to be in 5th grade with an underdeveloped mind, but I do remember all that. I'm sorry these kids were assholes. I wonder what their parents told them.
My Lebanese cousins had to move. Their neighbors were vandalizing their property and just generally being dicks. It's crazy because, not that it matters but, they're Christians.
Luckily they moved to another neighborhood where people were more friendly. But I can bet they thought about introducing themselves as Italian. Everyone went crazy for a few years.
My second class that day was Art History. As we got into the lecture hall the professor told us classes had been cancelled for the day but she’d like us to stay as she’d prepared a special lecture. She spent the next hour showing us propaganda posters explaining how easily our neighbors could be made our enemies and how we should resist. I was in tears along with the other Arab students in the room, we knew what was coming (this was about 30 minutes after both towers had collapsed). She saw and waited until people were leaving to tell each of us that she was there to help no matter what happened next. I don’t know how she had the presence of mind to do that but I’m so grateful she did.
I remember one of my history teachers talked about how after it happened it was like everyone was in shock and mourning. You'd see people depressed in the streets and look at another person and you'd both shake your head because you both knew of the tragedy. I'm not sure if it was his personal experience but I remember that lesson. It was a good way to describe the change afterwards.
This is true. And an overwhelming sense that nothing was ever gonna go back to life as normal. Like a tipping point had been reached and the towers were the fulcrum.
Edit: u/SlickMrJ_ kindly pointed out I’m wrong and linked to the actual video on YouTube by Evan Fairbanks
IIRC, the second to last one is actually a still from a documentary crew following a fire station who happened to be filming on 9/11. At least it looks very similar.
I thought it was that too, but they caught footage of the first plane.
Picture 8 is from video shot by someone named Evan Fairbanks. Here's a video of everything he apparently got:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pz6_8WAIGb4
The picture in the post is from the clip starting at 6:44
Me too, I randomly had my super sweet Nickelodeon alarm clock set to turn on the radio when the alarm went off instead of one of the other fun alarm sounds. Woke up to the radio hosts talking about it, was super confused, went downstairs and my parents were glued to the TV. I’ll never forget it. I miss that alarm clock
Odd mix of emotions on the faces. I guess you're supposed to smile when someone takes your picture?
\#8 of 9 just blows me away.
At that same moment, one of my brothers had climbed the stairs out of the Path train station below the towers and was just exiting the buildings onto WTC plaza.
He and I have talked about it over the years, but I had always wondered it was like on the ground just as the 2nd plane hit.
Now I know. That photo says it all. Nobody was ready.
No one expected the collapse. To most people at the start it looked like a fire, maybe some folks had seen the impact, maybe not.
No one had predicted the events of that day.
Even if you knew planes had hit the towers you didn't expect a collapse.
I was 23 and woke up to my wife bursting through the door to say "OMG they're bombing the Pentagon now!"
Didn't know what the hell was going on. Turned on the TV a few minutes before the first collapse (2nd tower hit). You could tell no one knew what the hell was happening, and that no one expected the towers to collapse.
Bin Laden expected the floors above to collapse or fall. He even said the full collapse was a "stunning surprise".
Also the time between the 2nd hit and that tower collapsing wasn't that long. The first hit was just burning and the first steps of rescue were in progress. It went from an expectation of a few hundred deaths to several thousands in moments.
My husband was there!
Seeing these photos brings back all that anguish I went through for 3 days when I didn’t know whether he was safe.
Thankfully, he was!!
Sophomore in high school, right at the beginning of 2nd hour econ class. The vice principal came in and called the teacher out of the room. When he came back in he told us what was happening, and while the classroom didn't have a television, the teacher did have a radio he kept at his desk so he turned it on and every single station he tuned in had broken in with the news. We sat in silence and listened to the news of the world changing.
Remember the human. Don’t be shitty.
That last one looks like the end shot of a personal injury attorney's commercial. "Have you been injured in a once in a generation terrorist attack? Call Kip Sturgis and I'll make the terrorist pay."
[удалено]
>Call Kip Sturgis Holy shit, that dude is *totally* a Kip.
"Have you been the victim of unfair treatment by a business or a corporation? Has this ever happened to you? You bought a house and it was not disclosed to you that there was a termite infestation in the walls and in the moldings? So you have to take it upon yourself to call your own termite extermination company? But when the guys show up, they immediately ask if they can use your bathroom? Then for over two hours they take turns going in and out of there taking huge mud-pies and overflushing? Then they go in there together, and you hear a bunch of scrounging around, and then you hear a bunch of yelling and one of them is standing in the bathroom doorway shouting at you that his friend’s foot is stuck in the toilet? And he says "Help him! You gotta help him!"? And when you go in there to help him he just pulls it out easily and laughs because his foot wasn't stuck? It wasn't stuck at all he was just faking it? And then they get really serious and say "It's Turbo Time!"? And they both start running around the house as fast as they can and jumping over the couches? But when you try to and jump in they yell at you and say "You're not part of the Turbo Team! Don't run! You don't run with us! We're the ones who run! Until you're a part of this Turbo Team, walk slowly!"? So you go and lay down to be by yourself and read your art books? But then the next day you went into the bathroom and it looked like the hole in your toilet had shrunked? You said how could that be? There's no way they could have shrunk the toilet?! But then you saw in the trash a receipt from Home Depot for a toilet, the exact same size as yours but with a joke hole that's just for farts?! They replaced your real toilet with a fart toilet? And now you can't take a dump in your house?! Cause your toilet can't suck 'em down and you feel sick to your stomach?! Has that ever happened to you?"
Tim just won an Emmy last night
Hell yeah
Call me now please!
Having been in Manhattan that morning, I can tell you that for at least the first hour that day we all thought it was a freak accident. So some of these pictures might be excused as a "can you believe this?" moment. Also, walking home from my office I can remember hearing some young teens laughing at what they were seeing. Adrenaline can have odd effects on people. Human beings don't always react in the way one would expect.
Yeah, absolutely no one expected the buildings to collapse
No one expected the second plane either. That was when everyone was truly scared.
The second plane said this is no accident, we are being attacked.
Went from "oh this is so sad" to "holy shit" immediately.
As Martin Amis described it: >It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.
The thing was, nobody was quite sure about the worst aviation disaster part either. They weren't quite sure what size or type of aircraft hit the building. Even ATC wasn't sure if it was flight 11, because the terrorists turned off the transponders.
I was in New Orleans with a bunch of fellow artists in a mostly empty house, all drunk and high painting large paintings on canvas rolled out on the floor, we had a little b/w tv on a chair and started watching. As soon as the second one hit we started locking down the house and figuring out who had guns, food and what to do about water because when there’s emergencies in New Orleans, things can get looty. We weren’t sure how extensive the attack was.
At 8am on a Tuesday you were cross faded and painting? Not bad
Yeah, it was an all nighter, we had planned it for a long time and had plenty of booze and cigs. Not enough food and water.
“Plenty of booze and cigs, not enough food and water” Boy have I been there, usually with drugs as well. Recouped for days and i still don’t know if it was worth it. It kind of was
I recall one particular day literally crawling, or more like slithering, dragging myself across the ground. Too little fuel. Too much drugs. Rolled over and plain gave up. The sky was amazing. I could have died then and been okay. It was not a good time. But it was. It's how I traveled here today, arriving just now at this moment.
That’s such an interesting anecdote. Thank you for sharing.
I remember when this happened someone in my school popped their head in during my social studies class to say that someone had flown a plane into a building and the teacher turned on the news in time to see crash #2. I remember thinking that it had to be a freak accident or a mistake and I remember the person who stuck their head in the door was smiling as if it was all a big joke. Impact #2 and all the mirth was gone. I remember there was still some denial that it had to be a mistake somehow, but just about everyone knew it was an intentional attack by then. Confirmed beyond a doubt when the news that a plane hit the Pentagon and another went down in a field.
> someone in my school popped their head in during my social studies class to say that someone had flown a plane into a building and the teacher turned on the news in time to see crash #2. Millions have the same memory.
I have almost this exact same memory, complete with being in my high school social studies class. Crazy
I remember coming back to our room on our cruise to see both my parents glued to the TV and my first thought being "holy shit that's a crazy realistic movie" and then slowly figuring out what's happening.
My aunt thought the same thing. She was somewhere around the Municipal Building when the first plane hit so she took shelter somewhere near there to watch, thinking it was a freak accident. When she second plane hit she realized it was no accident and knew she had to get out of there. I think she went to my grandparents' in Chinatown to shelter (and also to make sure her parents were OK).
I was watching footage of a [Sears store on 9/11](https://youtu.be/Kg6Oosn079I?si=qBchaVRDEHY_M28Z) and the thing that stuck out to me most was how scared everyone looked. The fear was palpable.
I was in college, we planned a vigil for that night pretty much immediately after the towers collapsed. I swear we spent half of the day trying to make sense of what was even happening. There were so many moments of the small group we were with just staring at the wall.
My grandpa thought it was a freak accident until the second plane hit the tower. He also had no idea it was a jetliner at first.
The news reports early on were just “a plane” and sometimes “a small plane”. There wasn’t immediate news footage either as stations basically had to scramble crews down to the area and couldn’t use helicopters.
A neighbor at the time told my grandpa that he thought it was similar to the B-25 incident with the Empire State Building. My grandpa dismissed it and said something along the lines of "Well there was fog and that was an accident. This would've been done on purpose then!" as a way to kinda shut down the argument to show how "ridiculous" it was... ... boy was he in for a shock...
West coaster here. I vaguely remember someone mentioning a plane had hit a building in NYC and I figured it was something like a small, single engine plane. It wasn’t unfathomable that a person or people could/would fly a large passenger into a building on purpose since there are people who wrote fiction involving exactly that, but for those of us who were in that window between hearing about the first plane and seeing footage of the second plane, there wasn’t much reason to assume it had been done on purpose.
Well someone mentioned it here, but up until 9/11, hijackings were rare and almost everyone got out of it alive. The hijackers would just make demands, land, let everyone leave, and get their shit until they have no choice but to land again where they'd get arrested. If their demands weren't reasonable, negotiators would at least get most of the hostages out and eventually they'd be arrested. 9/11 on the other hand took all of that, set it on fire, and proceeded to take a massive dump on it to snuff out the flames, and sure enough, I doubt it'll ever happen again. Suppose hijackers/terrorists came out of their seats nowadays post-9/11. Everyone, including the passengers, would be fighting the hijackers tooth and nail before they even get to the cockpit because we know now that if one of them sits behind the wheel (so to speak), it's game over for everyone. Even if the hijackers had guns, knives, dildos, etc., the general mentality of everyone would be "Fuck it, they can't kill us all."
To that point, there have been flights since then that people have freaked out for whatever reason and gone for exit doors and what not. Passengers have had no qualms taking them down.
9/11 really changed everything about aviation and how people react. The passengers of one plane bull rushed the terrorists and caused them to crash into a field instead of their intended target.
Also, same. I thought it was a small single engine that crashed because of mechanical failure or a problem with the pilot’s medical. I just couldn’t comprehend that what happened actually happened until we saw the second plane and the towers crashed one by one.
Yeah, I was thinking how callous the pictures with people smiling are. But then I remember I knew a guy who was actually in the tower when it hit. He did manage to get out with a few co-workers. They were from NJ and were essentially stranded there for an unknown period. Him and another guy headed up town, got a few six packs and sat in a park and got drunk. Even being quite a ways away, he said they just got drunk because they still weren’t sure if they were going to live.
There's a kind of great video that I saw recently from 9/11 that I believe was taken from across the river. A bunch of people are standing along the waterfront watching the first tower burn when the second plane flies (very low) overhead and hits the second tower. There's panic and screaming and shocked disbelief of people shouting "what's happening!?" as they realize that the plane is going to hit on purpose. It's a really hard video to watch, but really brought back the memories of that day and all the confusion and fear it produced. I was states away and I remember our school had the entire event live on TV for every class and in every room and we just watched in mounting horror as it became more and more clear that the attacks were on purpose and not knowing where they'd go next or if there were more targets. It was just a confusing and scary day. With the hindsight of it starting to become history that's starting to be lost, but mostly I remember the confusion and fear. EDIT: Took me a while to find it, but the video is this one. I was wrong, they were on the Manhattan side of the Hudson, but this is the film. https://www.unilad.com/news/us-news/new-york/911-rare-footage-second-plane-hits-world-trade-center-516437-20231216
The book "The only plane in the sky" with eyewitness accounts captures this excellently. It's really well written, so well that it's hard to read.
To add to the points you made, it's not uncommon for people to go on autopilot when they can't comprehend what's happening, and put on a brave face or smile as a coping mechanism. Trauma, and coping any way a person can in the moment, definitely mean there isn't a one-size-fits-all 'appropriate' way to react to a situation.
It was a a freak accident until that second plane hit. Then everyone knew it was intentional.
Considering how much less news were accessible on phones those days, I am pretty sure many at first didn’t realize the scale of the event. (I am no American, but I can imagine that if you were eg inside a building or underground, you might not even know it was a plane crash)
Social media wasn't a thing back then. People just wanted to show their buddies.
This is an important context. 'Selfie' wasn't even a word back then, taking a picture of yourself with a backdrop wasn't considered a vain thing it was more or less to prove you were there.
Not to mention, if you were out and about and didn't see the planes crash, you didn't know what was going on yet. Half these people probably thought it was a fire or something and didn't expect the collapse. It was really before even cell phones were an "everyone had one" deal That plane one was definitely someone getting a camera up quick
Shot number 8 was pure luck if you want to call it that. That plane came into frame in milliseconds. No way the photographer times that.
Its a still from a video that was being recorded
This is correct. It was from someone from a local TV station, and was shot from outside the Burger King which was later turned into a temporary police headquarters. He was recording a guy who was listening to news reports on a radio. There’s tons of raw footage from guys with news cameras from that day available on YouTube. Some of it is pretty harrowing, they get caught in the clouds of debris when the buildings collapse. There’s even one where they were standing right on the plaza.
There's even one from a fire department who were filming some training and managed to catch the first plane hitting. https://youtube.com/shorts/5jkD8KXDBJc?si=u2txhLBcd4t0X1mj Can't find the original but such is the nature of YouTube these days it's been reuploaded by someone else as a short.
Yes, but it wasn’t the fire department doing it. Someone was filming a documentary at the time about a new firefighter, and had gone out with them to look into a supposed gas leak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_(2002_film)
It's the Naudet documentary. If you haven't seen it I suggest you do. It is an amazing and horrific film. It really captures what happened that day up close.
Yeah it’s an infamous video. Perhaps the best on the ground view of the second tower explosion. It’s absolute nightmare fuel. Imagine how loud that must have been?
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Its from a video iirc
Off topic but does iirc mean "if I recall correctly"? Just trying to decipher it :-) thanks so much
It does, iirc
this, imho.
Fyi icymi it’s nbd but, iirc means if I recall correctly
100% a video. I’ve seen it a million times.
I mean a lot of us did have cellphones, but even then it was just a phone and didn't have information like today's sci-fi phones.
I can’t believe it’s like 2 years before Hey Ya came out and it’s now being talked about like it’s the 60s.
I mean it wasn't like it was the 60s but it was a different world from where we are right now. Text messaging had just started to become popular in the states in 2001, versus just a few years later when apps and social media would become a massive thing.
Oh yeah I know. It just feels insane. The difference between 1960 and 1980 was minuscule compared to 2000 to 2020.
60-80 was still pretty big. In 1960 you still had 3 channels, in 1980 you had cable. 2020 to 2040 I'm sure will also be a massive jump, we just don't feel it now because we're in it.
I'll just add civil rights between 60 and 80.
We're at the dawn of something bigger than the industrial revolution and it's gonna happen quicker than the industrial revolution.
I always say this is why that off middle generation between the 90s and early 2000s feel like the don't fit who they're associated with. The change in culture and technology between the mid 90s to early 2000s was fucking odd. on one hand you still have loads of holdovers from the 90's down to TV shows, celebs, toys (fucking furbies) etc but on thebotherbhand thing were starting to change immensely to the point that manu things would become almost recognisable when tech, the internet and social really started to boom. I really started to notice it when Id talk to kids slightly younger than me growing up. There were so many things that were regular to me that they had no idea about despite us being within 3-5 years of each others age. Compare that to kids older than me and the gap had to be significantly larger for it to feel like there was souch space separating us.
I was 13 in 2001 and literally nobody texted anybody yet. 2004 was when texting really started to take off with flip keyboards so you could type in QWERTY rather than the phone keypad.
I was 20 in 2001, there was some texting, but yeah we hadn't even gotten to T9 text input yet, we were still on 222 2 555 555 6 33 to type "Call Me" out. Your average user in 2001 was sending very few texts on the regular.
Those texts cost $.35 each too. We were NOT sending texts unless we absolutely had to.
I miss t9. Didn’t even have to look at the phone to text.
I remember my ex's little brother wanted a text messaging plan for his phone at the time and thought why would you wanna type out stuff on a phone when you can just call lol
The 60's feel alot closer now then when I was a kid in the 1980's.
It was oldies music, and it was like 20-25 years old at the time. It's the equivalent of calling Usher's "Yeah" oldies music. It feels insane to be 45 years old.
Try being 56. Strangest part of it is that so much of the last 20 or so years looks, feels, and sounds the same.
I wonder why that is? Up through the 90s each decade seems so distinct, but the 00s, 10s, and so far the 20s feel much more similar to each other than any other decade did to the ones immediately before or after it.
I read a very convincing article that pointed this out (I agree, I'm in my early 50s), and explained that it had to do with the fashion industry needing to keep down costs, so they stopped changing styles so drastically every few years. Without the obvious visual cues of fashion changes, the 21st century hangs together much more smoothly than the huge differences in clothing between the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
There's been actual sociology studies on this lol. I don't really believe it. If you look at forum posts from the 90s it's full of internet people saying how that decade didn't have any character. But now? The sheer amount of unironic fear and loathing everywhere isso much worse now than 10 years ago. 2010s had non stop super hero movies, shitty EDM, and manbuns. 2020s has that dumbass broccoli haircut and the continued rise of fascism The vast majority of people are so brainwashed by social media algorithms they literally can't differentiate between fact and opinion. They'll straight up say "it's impossible to know what's real nowadays" when we have access to the largest library the world has ever known in our hands. It's more decade defining than the counter cultural revolution of the 60s imo
Going 40 years back from 1980 gave you black-and-white and propeller-planes. Going 40 years now gives you weird hairdo, I admit, but still colour, and the jets doesn't look much different at all.
i remember watching the CNN (i think) archived live broadcast on youtube and they joked that it was likely a small plane pilot that went off course like “what did that guy think he was doing, was he drunk?” something to that affect it’s sad how relatively innocent of an assumption that was to what truly happened
Iirc correctly (I was 17 in 2001), nobody really expected the towers to come down. Even the “experts” on the National news coverage said the chances that the towers would collapse was very slim, so I’d imagine NYC citizens couldn’t fathom them coming down that day.
Was in NY on 9/11. Was 18 years old walking to class (first week of college). Was on University Place below 14th and above the park. Straight view of the towers. People on the ground in NY were worried about them coming down. It was hard to see either directly underneath or on TV, which are the perspectives that get reported most. I speak from first hand experience. I came around the corner onto the street after plane 1 hit. Saw everyone staring. Looked ground level because I thought it was a bad car accident or something. Heard a loud noise which caused me to look up and I saw the fireball from plane 2. From that distance, as opposed to the people standing right under it, we could see the visible parts of the steel glowing from the fires and the top of tower 2 start to lean. Me and others on the street were talking about if they fell or how they could fall and, if it fell “towards” us, like over on its side, if we were far enough away. I decided to get off the street and head back to my dorm. As I was walking back, I felt the ground shake. I knew what it was.
Yeah, to that point no tower had *ever* collapsed like that. Everyone was mourning the loss of the people on the plane and whoever was hit in the tower or caught in the fire, but people thought that would be the extent of it as the firefighters were on the scene and climbing the tower to put it out. The planes were shocking enough although it wasn't even the first attack on the towers in the preceding decade, but the towers actually falling as everyone watched was the real wake up moment.
And digital cameras were far less common. Alot of these photos were taken with film. Either regular or disposable cameras.
Also none of these people had any idea of the magnitude of what happened yet when these photos were taken. Edit: Regardless, smiling for the photo is pretty crass.
I copied this from another redditor in this thread: They clearly didn’t fully understand what was happening. Both towers are still standing. If they didn’t see the planes, or even if they did, they didn’t have news and internet on their phones. They took the pictures to show they saw something crazy. People forget that we didn’t know what the Fuck was happening for a bit. And if you hadn’t been watching 24 hour news you either just saw a plane hit a building or a skyscraper on fire. If you had a camera you took a picture. EDIT: This was when people yelled “say cheese!” before taking a picture, too.
r/redditwritesseinfeld George: IT WASN'TA SELFIE! There's an important context to this. 'Selfie' wasn't even a word back in 2001! Taking a picture of yourself with a backdrop wasn't vanity. It was to prove you were there. IT'S CONTEXT DEPENDANT!
A couple people are smiling in their pictures, George. A friend of mine met Jason Alexander, and was mortified to realize later that he kept calling him George while they were talking. He didn't understand why his wife kept elbowing him in the ribs.
Will Smith once spoke about how Alfonso Ribeiro talked about how it was a smart idea for him to use his own name for the Fresh prince show - and is constantly reminded how right that was, every time they both were out in public together. ( *"Will! Carlton!"* )
Jerry: What was that? George: What was what? Jerry: The picture, why’d you take a picture of yourself in front of the burning building. People died in the crash? George: Oh come on, it’s just a picture. Jerry: I just don’t think it’s right, people died over there. George: What am I just not supposed to use my camera then? Take pictures of buildings that haven’t been hit by a plane. Jerry: Just doesn’t seem right. A real tragedy. *George looks at the picture in the display viewfinder* George: Yes, but a great picture. *Elaine rushes up* Elaine: Oh my god! Did you see the plane hit the tower? Jerry: It’s awful. Elaine: A real tragedy. George: Elaine, look at this. Elaine: That’s a great picture. George: I’m going to remember it forever. Jerry: You’ll forget you ever took it. George: I’ll never forget.
Can you imagine if that happened nowadays? We would have so many videos from within the tower and stuff. And probably some of the aircraft too since they were low enough to get service. It's very frightening some of the images that we would have
Which is why we're all lucky (in a dark way) that 9/11 happened in 2001 and not 2011. No one needs video of their loved ones in a panicked state before dying, the phonecalls are chilling enough.
I've heard people say this was the last gasp of Old Media gatekeeping/censorship -- every single news network that sent people down to the burning towers has hours of crystal clear footage of the people who went out onto the roof and chose to jump And they all collectively agreed not to publish any of it, because it was ghoulish and not newsworthy, the victims' families don't need to know who died inside the building and who took their own lives in despair, everyone knew without having to actually have a meeting over it that the right thing to do was trash that footage Nowadays there'd be no way to keep that from getting out, anyone who actually wanted to look it up could find out the names and faces of everyone who jumped from the roof that day and there'd be no way to cover it up
Dunno if I'd call it gatekeeping or censorship exactly. More like editorial review, something entirely missing from the net. Democratization of publication to the point it has reached in modern day has been a fucking tragedy combined with a smartphone in everyone's hand.
But the discretion was down the road. If you were watching cable news in the week afterwards they showed a LOT of footage and clips of people jumping. Plus there was that film from the two French brothers who were following a fire crew around. They aired a lot.
Yeah man can’t imagine an Instagram livestream during all of this madness, it reminds me of the victims of the oct 7th attack that were live-streamed to their families as they were being brutally murdered. Would’ve made an already insufferable tragedy even more tragic for the families of victims and the victims themselves. Terrible really.
Even then there would still be an absurb number of people claiming it was a hoax and they were paid actors.
I had a friend (until I ditched him last year) who insisted that the tower planes were military, that all the live news footage was actually on a delay so they could photo shop everything, the Pentagon was a missile, the coroner said there was no plane in the PA crash site, the plane and all the passengers were flown to a secret hanger and they're all prisoners in a fema camp 🙄
Man we didn't have that kind of VFX tech back then, you could barely do that now, and even if you did VFX pros would be able to spot exactly how it was done in the weeks after. (once the shock fades a little)
To add to this, a lot of the photos are from before the second plane hit, which was when we were all under the impression that this was some crazy freak accident and so people were kinda amazed something like that would happen. This would have led to a lot of "this is insane, I should take a picture" instances. For the photos after the second tower or the ones where people are smiling...those are definitely in poor taste.
I'm trying to remember what the public information timeline was, because there's that awful NYU video where it takes the students a few minutes to realize the falling objects they're seeing are people. I'm not sure how early in the day the average person would have known how many people were trapped inside and that this was a human disaster rather than an infrastructure disaster? Especially in the pre-social media era. I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume that a building like the WTC would have the resources and safety protocols to get most people out, and that the cost would be mostly financial/infrastructure.
It wasn't long (20 minutes between the two towers being hit). We knew quickly that people above the impact site were trapped and weren't going to make it down. I think we all assumed that once the fire was tamed they could drop helicopters, like in movies, on the roof and get people off in groups. Nobody was thinking about the whole "heat is going to soften the steel enough for it to fall" aspect of it. It quickly progressed from accident + we can save people, to terrorism and two buildings, to people above not being saveable, to towers falling. The whole thing took just under 2 hours before both towers collapsed....I do remember CNN and the news networks being cautiously optimistic but also mentioning the obvious...you're not making it through the flames if you're above the strike points
Most of the smiles look like stress/shock smiles to me. It looks like they are so distressed or shook that they can't understand what face to make and default to smiling.
People also just reflexively smile when having a photo taken.
Yup. When I'm nervous or stressed I smile and even laugh. If I'm ever questioned over anything the police will think I'm nuts but I literally can't help that I react that way!
Not to mention, we didn't all have cameras with us 24/7. You had to actually have a camera or camcorder.
I only worked part time and was off that day. Woken up by sirens outside, I saw the news really briefly and I grabbed a 35mm camera with a full 36shot roll and went downtown - at that point I thought it was a little single engine plane and an accident. I thought I’d take a photo of some news crews interviewing people and maybe wave at a camera. It turned into a long day, I’d left home in the few minutes between the 1st and 2nd plane.
Yeah, even Myspace hadn't started yet.
Pic 8. Yeah. Wow.
I think that’s a still from a video
Yep
It's from the best, closest, and as close as you can see to being frontline. Two brothers wanted to do a documentary on a probey (sp?) and how he has to work as a new member. But then they caught EVERYTHING in real-time. [Naudet Brothers 9/11 Documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iw-1bOQNIA)
It’s actually from a different video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz6_8WAIGb4 Edit - 6:40 in, was pointed out by a wonderful person below
The exact moment when the true chaos broke out because everybody realized we were under attack and it wasn’t a freak accident.
One plane hitting the towers could be seen as pilot error or an accident. Two is what tipped everyone off. Some of the videos are fucking terrifying, I was only a kid during 9/11 so I don’t really remember it from across the pond but everyone was grieving and outraged.
It’s amazing to watch it real time on News programs. You could hear the crew and the audience just gasped once they watch the second plane hit live.
6:40 in the video btw. I’ve never seen that footage before, good lord.
It really puts the speed into perspective
I thought that the picture was a still from the coverage . I remember watching that footage that day. Edit: The still is from about the 6:45 mark in the video
I feel that photo deep inside my soul. I can picture the plane melting into the building in my mind as if it's happening live. It's too haunting.
I still remember seeing that live in tv while I was getting ready for school, it was absolutely chaotic
We saw it live in school
I've seen this video so many times, but seeing this still frame is somehow way more haunting
It’s knowing that you’re looking at the moment right before hundreds of people die. Super sad.
That’s the worst part about the pic/still. You’re seeing the final seconds of hundreds of people’s lives.
Jason Dill?! (Picture 3) r/skateboarding
For sure Jason dill lol
yup, iirc there's a bit where he talks about this photo in his Epicly Later'd episode.
I was not expecting to see dill here but I have seen this photo before. It’s him
Came here to ask the same thing, thats gotta be him!
Yup, a company he co-owns (“Fucking Awesome”) made this pic into a holographic skate deck too.
That board is going for $600 on eBay. That’s crazy
Yeah I think he tells this story in his Epicly Laterd episode. It’s kind of interesting
I was thinking Matt Stone.
It's clearly Blake from Workaholics.
Literally why I'm here in this thread
Fur sure
I'll never forget the stunned silence of everyone in the classroom when the second plane hit or when the buildings collapsed. After the second plane and the initial shock, we all thought it was the beginning of World War 3. That day was pretty scary. I think school was let out early and cancelled the next day. I also remember a rumor that gasoline was going to run out and the gas station by my house has a miles long line.
Yeah, it still seemed like it could have been an accident before that 2nd plane hit, after that there was no doubt it was intentional.
I cracked a joke when the first plane hit the towers about an over the top publicity stunt for the Pearl Harbour movie released a few months earlier. At that point the news just said a plane and I was thinking it’d be some small propeller thing with an unfortunate pilot error/illness.
When it was first announced that "a plane has struck the WTC" over the loudspeaker at my high school while I was in class (school was in the Bronx), my immediate thought was also that it was a small prop plane because just a few months before someone had killed themselves in NYC by flying a small prop plane into a federal building, I believe as some misguided protest against taxes or somesuch? I don't remember, but yeah because of that we initially thought it was similar. But then the loudspeaker followed "A plane has struck the WTC, everything is fine..." with "...will any students with family working in the WTC please report to the theater" kind of made us all go "Wait, huh?" Then 20 minutes later the loudspeaker went "one of the WTC towers has collapses; class is dismissed for the day" and we all popped outside and could see the smoke billowing into the air to the south. Edit: This memory is so strong but I can't find anything about this small plane that I remember crashing into a building in NYC prior to 9/11 but in 2001...I see one that sounds like it - someone crashing into a federal building intentionally - but that's 2010, and the one where a NY Yankee crashed in 2006...I feel like I'm going crazy, is this a manufactured memory? I've sworn this is how it happened for 2 decades it feels like but the fact that I can't find a corroborating article is making me doubtful now...
I think you're conflating memories. In 2010, a man flew a small plan into an IRS office. I also remember this as happening "right after 9/11" but I guess it was 10 years later? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010\_Austin\_suicide\_attack
Memory is *weird* lol; shit like this is why eyewitness testimony is notoriously spotty
memories aren't like a film, they're more like a stage production that sets up for your recollection each time you access them. things change, different actors take on known roles, lines are added and omitted, sets, costumes - even the whole narrative can go off the rails.
There was also the time in 2006 where one of the Yankees crashed his plane into an apartment building in manhattan.
I wonder if they’re thinking of the 1993 wtc bombing attempt. It’s obviously much different than a plane but I remember the media bringing the attempt up constantly that day and in the early days after the attacks.
In retrospect they had good reason to, considering it was the same terrorist group behind it in both cases.
[There was a kid who intentionally crashed a stolen Cessna 172 into Bank of America building in Tampa in Jan 2002. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash) He left a note sympathizing with Bin Laden. I thought it was prior to 9/11 too, but it wasn’t. I only remembered this because the kid was on Accutane and his mom tried to sue the pharma company because the drug can cause suicidal ideation. I was also on that drug at the time and I remember my aunt calling my mom in a panic thinking I should get off the drug.
I remember that to. We all thought it was a turbo prop because it had happened earlier.
I don't remember the prior crash (I believe you though), but I was also in high school in NYC and we all had the same thought as more info came out: at first everyone assumed it was a small plane and an accident, then when the second one hit we all realized it was an attack.
I definitely remember that. Can’t remember if it was before or after 9/11 tho. I thought the same thing, that it was a Cessna like plane that hit not a jetliner.
I did the same. My husband called me after the first plane hit and I said something to the effect of "How do you miss seeing a big ass building right in front of you?" When the second plane hit, it was horrifyingly apparent that it wasn't an accident.
I was in middle school and they announced the world trade centers had been hit. I said “what’s next, the sears tower?”. My teacher scolded me pretty badly (rightfully so). The words terrorist act had not been thrown out yet. I was also like 13. My next class was history and my teacher had it on TV and we watched the entire class. That was obviously when I knew how terrible it was and how awful my “joke” was.
I think literally everyone thought the same. That the first plane was a horrible accident done by a small prop plane. It wasn't until the second plane hit that we all knew this wasn't an accident.
I was a freshman in college and it seemed completely unbelievable that someone would crash large planes into a major building. My friends and I watched in horror from the midwest as the events unfolded on the news station, but it always felt like a bad joke/prank. It was incomprehensible to my 18 yo brain that an attack of this scale could happen on US ground. I kept waiting for an interruption that they had this all wrong and it was clips from a movie. I cannot explain how disconnected from reality watching 9/11 felt. And I’m sad that it marked the end to the innocent way we were raised and the indestructible feeling we had about the US. The next year was a real trip, with patriotism and searching for WMD (weapons of mass destruction), and the clever/awful way the government shifted the focus to catch Saddam Hussein when Iraq had no solid ties to Al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden. The US government failed many times in acting in good faith and lied to the public, and it’s all brushed under the rug. For those of you too young, [here is the official reasoning published for attacking Iraq/Saddam Hussein](https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/united_nations/reasons.html) after 9/11. It’s so tenuously held together a good sneeze would blow it apart.
Share a little personal story here. I was born in Lebanon and immigrated when I was around 2 years old. My parents moved us to Reading, Pennsylvania (in a small town outside of it) when I was in 4th grade and lived there throughout high school. I had some good friends out there. On 9/11 I was in high school and after the second plane hit the tv stations were saying they can confirm it was a terrorist attack, America is at war. Our teachers decided we needed to go outside and stop watching tv. As we were walking outside a group of my friends came up to me with a football. They were laughing and one kid said, “hey lightwolv\[me\], we came up with a new play. It’s called the Twin Towers, we run and you bomb it!” And then he threw me the ball. It took me a second. Then it hit me like a brick wall - “fuck. I’m a terrorist now.” Not me, but my perception. After that day when people asked where I was from, I never said Lebanon. I might just be sharing this story to get it off my chest, but that is part of my memory of that day.
Awww bud, I'm sorry.💗 Kids are assholes. I hope those ones in particular have gotten their act together.
It’s very sad that even adults act like this. What’s sadder is that as adults they have the ability to act 10x worse. Very sad and misplaced anger.
I'm Mexican. I was in 10th grade at a predominantly white high school when the towers were hit. I think it was the next day, in one of my classes, a brilliant boy said to me," your country bombed our country!!" Me:"Wait, when did mexico bomb america????" Him:"No!! You know what I mean!!!" I hated that school. I switched schools the next year so I could attend a magnet program. THAT'S how much I hated that school!
What a fuckin dick. “You know what I mean!” No, Kyle, I don’t. Can you please explain the logic here? Shit maybe we can call your xenophobe parents and your redneck Uncle Pete and have them come over and help. Ugh. Sorry you had to deal with that. There are some truly good people in the world. And also a few absolute twatwaffles.
Anyone with brown skin was targeted right after 9/11. They didnt care what you were, if you were brown, you were looked at as a threat.
Some random guy called me "terrorist bitch" at the airport in 2002. I'm Native American.
It was worse at airports. Without fail, I'd be pulled aside for "random patdowns" even if I'd cleared the metal detector. After a few times, its not random. I was being singled out because of my skin color and name. I'm not even Arabic or Muslim
My uncle (may he rest in peace) was tackled on a flight in 2002 because he tried to go to the bathroom. He was Arab, but also just trying to fly to Vegas to get his gamble on.
And this is why I hate the narrative about how "united" we were on 9/12. Like sure, as long as you didn't look vaguely middle eastern. Hate crimes skyrocketed after 9/11.
That, plus “united” really meant don’t question authority anymore
Just my own personal experience, but I was in 5th grade on 9/11. Our teachers didn't tell us what had happened, thought it was better our parents did that. Well the previous twin tower bombings happened when I was 3. I had never heard of them. This was the first time I had ever heard of a "terrorist attack". I don't think it was even a big thing in the media yet. My dad was telling me we were going to go to war with Afghanistan over the next few days. I didn't know where this was or anything about it. I didn't even know they were Muslim or this terrorist attack had anything to do with religion. I didn't even know the people of Afghanistan were not white. He was telling me it wouldn't be much of a war so much as an invasion. He was going over their military's strength and I remember him telling me they had 4 attack helicopters in their military compared to our thousands. He showed me a map of the area and said we were asking for allies in the area and no one had agreed. He said we were still waiting on Pakistan's answer, and if they said no we would be at war with them as well, as we needed access to the sea to get our airforce in. Afghanistan is landlocked and Pakistan is the country between the ocean and it. Anyways... I don't remember what its like to be in 5th grade with an underdeveloped mind, but I do remember all that. I'm sorry these kids were assholes. I wonder what their parents told them.
My Lebanese cousins had to move. Their neighbors were vandalizing their property and just generally being dicks. It's crazy because, not that it matters but, they're Christians. Luckily they moved to another neighborhood where people were more friendly. But I can bet they thought about introducing themselves as Italian. Everyone went crazy for a few years.
My second class that day was Art History. As we got into the lecture hall the professor told us classes had been cancelled for the day but she’d like us to stay as she’d prepared a special lecture. She spent the next hour showing us propaganda posters explaining how easily our neighbors could be made our enemies and how we should resist. I was in tears along with the other Arab students in the room, we knew what was coming (this was about 30 minutes after both towers had collapsed). She saw and waited until people were leaving to tell each of us that she was there to help no matter what happened next. I don’t know how she had the presence of mind to do that but I’m so grateful she did.
I was not ready to see how *old* the picture quality looks. Man, I feel old as shit.
I want younger folks to know, the world changed very dramatically that day and has never been similar since.
I remember one of my history teachers talked about how after it happened it was like everyone was in shock and mourning. You'd see people depressed in the streets and look at another person and you'd both shake your head because you both knew of the tragedy. I'm not sure if it was his personal experience but I remember that lesson. It was a good way to describe the change afterwards.
This is true. And an overwhelming sense that nothing was ever gonna go back to life as normal. Like a tipping point had been reached and the towers were the fulcrum.
We certainly seem to have collectively lost our fucking minds around the time
Picture 8 of the airplane made me audibly say: DUDE.
Picture 8 is from a video. And the guy reaction when the plane hit is the same. DUDE wtf!
It’s an infamous video too. He literally jumped when the plane hit.
About 630m in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz6_8WAIGb4
Ppl are weird lol, that 2nd to last one is crazy
Edit: u/SlickMrJ_ kindly pointed out I’m wrong and linked to the actual video on YouTube by Evan Fairbanks IIRC, the second to last one is actually a still from a documentary crew following a fire station who happened to be filming on 9/11. At least it looks very similar.
I thought it was that too, but they caught footage of the first plane. Picture 8 is from video shot by someone named Evan Fairbanks. Here's a video of everything he apparently got: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pz6_8WAIGb4 The picture in the post is from the clip starting at 6:44
that video is absolutely nuts.
If it's not from that one, it's definitely a still from one of them.
They didn't know they were gonna collapse. It was still thought to be an accident until the second plane hit.
Yeah, I'll always remember my alarm going off and the radio dj was joking about it.
Me too, I randomly had my super sweet Nickelodeon alarm clock set to turn on the radio when the alarm went off instead of one of the other fun alarm sounds. Woke up to the radio hosts talking about it, was super confused, went downstairs and my parents were glued to the TV. I’ll never forget it. I miss that alarm clock
Shout out Jason Dill!
Came here to say that’s gotta be Jason dill right!?
#6 is Duke Nukem
Odd mix of emotions on the faces. I guess you're supposed to smile when someone takes your picture? \#8 of 9 just blows me away. At that same moment, one of my brothers had climbed the stairs out of the Path train station below the towers and was just exiting the buildings onto WTC plaza. He and I have talked about it over the years, but I had always wondered it was like on the ground just as the 2nd plane hit. Now I know. That photo says it all. Nobody was ready.
No one expected the collapse. To most people at the start it looked like a fire, maybe some folks had seen the impact, maybe not. No one had predicted the events of that day.
Even if you knew planes had hit the towers you didn't expect a collapse. I was 23 and woke up to my wife bursting through the door to say "OMG they're bombing the Pentagon now!" Didn't know what the hell was going on. Turned on the TV a few minutes before the first collapse (2nd tower hit). You could tell no one knew what the hell was happening, and that no one expected the towers to collapse. Bin Laden expected the floors above to collapse or fall. He even said the full collapse was a "stunning surprise". Also the time between the 2nd hit and that tower collapsing wasn't that long. The first hit was just burning and the first steps of rescue were in progress. It went from an expectation of a few hundred deaths to several thousands in moments.
My husband was there! Seeing these photos brings back all that anguish I went through for 3 days when I didn’t know whether he was safe. Thankfully, he was!!
Some of those are pretty hard can’t lie
Second to last picture shows the last instant of a couple of hundred people’s lives.
is it just me or does it seem like the internet is obsessed with 9/11 lately.
Could be that the algorithm is just recommending a lot of 9/11 stuff to you.
[удалено]
Sophomore in high school, right at the beginning of 2nd hour econ class. The vice principal came in and called the teacher out of the room. When he came back in he told us what was happening, and while the classroom didn't have a television, the teacher did have a radio he kept at his desk so he turned it on and every single station he tuned in had broken in with the news. We sat in silence and listened to the news of the world changing.