9/11

Let's not forget what happened 23 years ago today. Here's an essay I wrote on the first anniversary.

Comments

[MOTW]

I am dismayed to read this headline today:
9/11 Used to be Off Limits. Now Gen Z has turned it into a meme.
SERIOUSLY? Before my grandson left for the bus stop, I read him "Just Because We're Americans", masterfully written two days after the event. He was sober and asked few questions.

[Jeff Meyerson]

A beautiful piece, worth reading over and over again.

I'm sure we all remember where we were 23 years ago today. I know I do. The most indelible image I have was, standing outside the post office in Red Hook, Brooklyn, just a couple of miles from the site, watching old fashioned fax paper blow over the river all the way to where we were, as the fire burned. Then later, even in my neighborhood at the other end of Brooklyn, rows and rows of pictures of the missing, taped on any available surface.

[Jim]

I've always appreciated Dave's first-year anniversary reflections on this horrible event. It's good to pause and reflect, and certainly with thanks for the heroic actions of those on Flight 93.

I'm now starting to see articles of reflection by the family member survivors who were young children at the time of their father or mother's death on 9/11. It's all very sobering.

[wanderer2575]

I know you're a humor writer but this still is the best piece you've written.

23 years ago I was at work in Detroit. I remember that when the reports started coming in, one of my first thoughts was that incoming shipments of paperwork expected in a couple days probably weren't going to make it. I was young and naive and had way more concern for the company than I should have.

[Falling Man's ghost]

No mention of Building 7?

[wiredog]

I was at work. One co-worker was a volunteer fireman who spent the night in the Pentagon. Another's wife had been roommates in college with a woman who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. I had one friend in the military who worked in the Pentagon and another, in the Old Guard, who worked at Arlington Cemetery.

@MOTW
I was born 24 years after Pearl Harbor. I don't recall anyone making a big deal out of it when I was growing up, and I'm pretty sure that if memes had been a thing then by the mid to late 70's I'd have been meme-ing it.

A quarter century is a long time ago if you're under 30.

[Tim Osman's ghost]

Methodical deception?

[Pullet Surprise]

Ah, thanks for your thoughts - sure was nice, but then you run into the paywall