Everyone seems to be doing this, so I’ll do mine. Where was I and what was I doing?
My wife [at the time] and I were scheduled to fly that very day from San Francisco to Chicago for a semi family reunion. Our scheduled flight time was probably late morning Pacific time.
I no longer remember whether this was triggered by checking on the Internet and finding that our flights were delayed, but at some point I turned on the TV and saw what everyone else was seeing.
I vividly remember a period of about 20 minutes when news reports were so confused and scattered, and it was so hard to know what was really going on, that I felt that there maybe everything was about to disintegrate, and I became simply afraid. At that moment, it didn’t seem implausible that we would hear something like this:
- The World Trade Center has been demolished
- The Pentagon and Capitol have been hit
- We have reports of nuclear detonations over Boston and Kansas City
- Enemy troops are moving northward from San Jose, CA
Within about a half an hour it was clear that this was a tragedy that would not affect *me*, and I stopped being personally afraid, and my concerns shifted back to the national and the civic. But during that period of personal fear any national or civic notions completely disappeared.
Needless to say we didn’t fly that day, and when we canceled our reservations at the resort spot we had one of those evanescent unity experiences that so many report – they didn’t want to charge us or take our deposit and said “We’re just glad that you’re all OK”.
About a month later I had this verklempt moment where I got weepy about how this was going to change the U.S. itself for the worse in every way, and was sad not just for the immediate tragic losses but also for what we might have become as a country if this had never happened. I think I was right in retrospect.
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