Reply #18: I was at my new job, about week 4 of 7 weeks of training

[hfojvt]

somebody came into the classroom and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center in NYC. I thought "what kind of plane? Was it an accident, or what?" Then I heard two planes and knew that it could not be an accident. When I went to lunch I saw that alot of people were glued to TVs and alot of TVs seemed to have been set up that were not there before. Reports trickled in during the day - a plane hitting the Pentagon and another one they think crashed in Pennsylvania. Then that all flights had been grounded and I thought "holy sh*t, they can do that?" A couple hours after that, we heard a plane taking off from the nearby KCI (it was later rumoured that that was Air Force 1 stopping for fuel, but other people said it flew over us but never landed).

By the time I got back home by about five there were lines all around the local gas stations. I think the radio had been saying they thought gas would goto $4 a gallon so there were half mile long lines of people trying to top off their tanks before the price went up. United we stand (in line as each person tries to get the cheap gas before it is all gone).

Then I watched the news, like I usually did, and they showed the buildings going down over and over and over again. It reminded me of the scene in Blue Thunder where the missile hits the office building - it seemed like a neat scene from a movie. I could not really comprehend that it was actually happening and that real people were getting killed and injured, although the TV was saying there might be 50,000 casualties. That seemed astoundingly high. But I was reminded of the Monday Night Football game where Joe Theisman's leg was broken. I tuned in sometime after that and of course was curious as to what happened to Joe. Over the next hour as I watched the game, they must have shown it again every five minutes. I watched it only once. That suffering seemed very real to me and was too sickening to watch again.

Then I tuned into W's promised speech and that was sickening, a bunch of jingoistic machismo and Bush promising to lead us into battle, and Trent Lott seeming to gloat that "there is no opposition party now". It seemed like a wet dream for them and they were going to milk it for all it was worth.