20th anniversary of 9/11/01 on Saturday- Your memories.

[88Comrade2000]

I originally posted on the 18th anniversary. My original post:

 

>>>> Can you believe it's been 18 years since that horrible day.

 

What's sad, terrorism is as strong as ever. We aren't safer. We are negotiating with the Taliban, who gave safe harbor to Osama bin Laden.  <<<

 

Well, Saturday is the 20th anniversary.  It's even more present in our memories, with the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fact the Taliban have regained control.

 

 

 

Edited September 9, 2021 by Rdskns2000

[Springfield]

I think we are safer from Muslim terrorists. Our concerns are different these days.

[Llevron]

1 minute ago, Springfield said:

I think we are safer from Muslim terrorists. Our concerns are different these days.

 

I definitely feel like we are. I remember going to the airport before and after that day. Crazy how things have changed because of it. I remember the argument that that's exactly the point of terrorism. 

 

I still remember all the other kids being picked up from school in groups of 40 or 50 at a time. They were calling them to the front office for early dismissal over the intercom for what seemed like hours at a time. I remember feeling the ground shake when the pentagon was hit. And I remember wondering what the hell was going on up until I left class and went to the band room where they stopped playing to watch the news. 

 

I hope I never have another memory burned into me like that again. 

[Renegade7]

My girl asked me how Americans celebrate 9/11 and I told her we dont, we commemorate instead, typically reminisce every year about where we were when it happened. 

 

And we got a lot of that commeration out the way already by invading a country and dropping the body of the guy responsible in the middle of the ocean then telling everyone he had a porn stash.  Saying we invaded two countries is borderline offtopic at this point, and technically we didnt stop there, so I didnt go there.

 

Living in DC when it happened and now working a couple blocks from the capitol, yes I feel safer then I did 18 years ago. But Mayor Pete made a point that hurt my soul, by time we get to 20 year anniversary there could be people deployed to Afganistan that weren't born when 9/11 happened.

 

Were at a point that remembering 9/11 is fine but we've had enough time since then for there to be a body of work concerning our government's reaction to retrospective on.  I dont want these yearly threads to be that, but that's what I think now, was our response to 9/11 the proper one? Highly debatable with results some may say was worth it.

Edited September 11, 2019 by Renegade7

[TheGreatBuzz]

Here is what I posted on the command Facebook page I manage.  Thought it was pretty good. 

 

Quote

Today marks the day where there are adults who were not yet born during the attacks 18 years ago.  Soon we will have men and women serving in the armed forces supporting a war they were not yet alive for the event that started it.  However, we will pass on the horrors of that day that forever changed the course of history.  Today, as we reflect, each in our own way, we ask you to keep in mind the loved ones of all those who were lost. Let their sacrifice serve to bring us closer together. We will never forget.

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

Jesus H tapdancing Christ.  

 

I've been embroiled in a text message debate with my mother for most of the day and it's absolutely infuriating.  She texted me to remind me that today was 9/11, to never forget, etc.  Which I told her, of course, who could forget?  And she just wanted to "make sure" because there are people out there that are "dangerous" who are "ignoring and forgetting today."

 

Which is the biggest steaming load of **** I've smelled in a long time.  And I just couldn't resist.  

 

So I asked her to prove it.  Find me people that aren't remembering and ignoring today.  And I just kept hammering away on her that it's a dumbass Fox News/conservative talk radio narrative that doesn't exist to get people exactly like her (old) riled up.  

 

The beautiful thing about texting with older people is that you can just berate them quickly since you can text quicker than them.  Before she knew it and could reply, I'd sent her screen caps of tweets of 9/11 rememberance from AOC, Ilhan Omar, Hillary and Obama, the goddamn Mount Rushmore of liberal boogeymen.

 

So I challenged her, I told her I'd buy her dinner at her favorite restaurant Friday night if she could find one person that wasn't remembering today.  15 minutes later she's comes back and has looked up every Mosque in a 10 mile radius with their websites/social media sites and everything that sure as hell don't have anything up about 9/11.    I then asked her where her tweets and social media remembrances were today, she said she didn't have to because we're having this conversation at which point I put my phone on Airplane mode and went back to work.  

 

Patriotic dick measuring by the conservatives is so f'ing annoying it's unbelievable.  It's spun off by these "news" organizations to make people think they're more patriotic than others who aren't tuning into their channel and no one has to lift a finger.  Because Sean Hannity looks into the camera and says you're a great American for tuning into his nightly propaganda machine, you believe him and think you're more patriotic than someone else and didn't have to lift a finger to do anything for it.  

[Elessar78]

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were heavily discriminated against. In the Pacific theater, America lost 100K+ soldiers and another 250K+ were injured. We dropped two bombs on their homeland. I don't have another "marker" but by the early 1980s Japanese cars were being manufactured in the US (not really sure what other cultural milestone to reference). As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11—there's still blanket fear of muslims (even though the terrorists just happened to be muslim and didn't speak for all of Islam). I wonder when the fear mongering will disappear. We don't even fear/hate the Russians as much as we used to and we "fought" a cold war with them for decades. Ditto for Germany. Maybe it's because the regimes that started WW2 and the cold war have been eliminated.

[TD_washingtonredskins]

21 minutes ago, Elessar78 said:

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were heavily discriminated against. In the Pacific theater, America lost 100K+ soldiers and another 250K+ were injured. We dropped two bombs on their homeland. I don't have another "marker" but by the early 1980s Japanese cars were being manufactured in the US (not really sure what other cultural milestone to reference). As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11—there's still blanket fear of muslims (even though the terrorists just happened to be muslim and didn't speak for all of Islam). I wonder when the fear mongering will disappear. We don't even fear/hate the Russians as much as we used to and we "fought" a cold war with them for decades. Ditto for Germany. Maybe it's because the regimes that started WW2 and the cold war have been eliminated.

 

I don't mean to turn the 9/11 thread into a debate, but do you truly believe there's still a "blanket fear of Muslims" in the US? 

[Cooked Crack]

5 minutes ago, TD_washingtonredskins said:

 

I don't mean to turn the 9/11 thread into a debate, but do you truly believe there's still a "blanket fear of Muslims" in the US? 

A guy just won an election by running on banning Muslims from entering the country.

[NoCalMike]

43 minutes ago, Spaceman Spiff said:

 

Patriotic dick measuring by the conservatives is so f'ing annoying it's unbelievable.  It's spun off by these "news" organizations to make people think they're more patriotic than others who aren't tuning into their channel and no one has to lift a finger.  

 

Surface level patriotism is an attribute of the modern day right-wing. Not sure if it has always been this way, but definitely since 9/11 there has been this total false bravado.  "USA USA USA" chants at rallies, American flag apparel, pledge of allegiance.  All things that while ultimately harmless are also empty gestures.  Remember when Obama was accused of hating America because he didn't have a flag lapel pin on his suit? Basically the right-wing version of virtue signaling to find out who is a "Real American"

Edited September 11, 2019 by NoCalMike

[TD_washingtonredskins]

2 minutes ago, Cooked Crack said:

A guy just won an election by running on banning Muslims from entering the country.

 

1) He ran on much more than that

2) Some people voting for Trump doesn't mean the nation fears Muslims 

[Dan T.]

I went to a 9/11 symposium this morning where Federal law enforcement officers who responded to all three sites spoke.

 

One special agent who spoke was at Ground Zero in NYC. His office was in the 6 World Trade Building, right at the base of the North tower.   When the first plane hit, debris and bodies rained down.  He and his colleagues mobilized to respond.  He was told to gather radios from the parked vehicles, which he did.  He kept busy at the site as the second plane hit and as people streamed out of the Towers and responders streamed in.  He was speaking with a colleague,  his back to the Tower, when his colleague "looked up behind me and shouted one word. 'Run!' "  He ran for his life - literally - as the first tower came down.  As he ran, something hit him in the back, he doesn't know what, and staggered him. He dove under a firetruck as the debris and dust cloud stormed over. He thought he was going to suffocate to death.  This was all just minutes after he had waved to three friends of his from the NYPD - where he previously worked - as they entered the tower to help with rescue efforts.  They didn't make it out. 

 

The one vignette that stuck with me from this special agent... he volunteered in the aftermath to help dig through the rubble i to recover victims. He heard all this weird chirping coming from the mountain of debris. It sounded like hundreds of crickets, but he didn't know what it was until a colleague said those were the locator devices firefighters wore on their service jackets, buried in the rubble.  He choked up as he told that part.

 

Googled this when I got back to my office:

 

 

Edited September 12, 2019 by Dan T.

[Cooked Crack]

7 minutes ago, TD_washingtonredskins said:

 

1) He ran on much more than that

2) Some people voting for Trump doesn't mean the nation fears Muslims 

Sure but the Muslim Ban was one of his top promises. Sixty something million people didn't think of it as a disqualifier. Maybe blanket fear isn't the right description but a the fear is there for a good chunk of Americans.

[TD_washingtonredskins]

1 minute ago, Cooked Crack said:

Sure but the Muslim Ban was one of his top promises. Sixty something million people didn't think of it as a disqualifier. Maybe blanket fear isn't the right description but a the fear is there for a good chunk of Americans.

 

I guess I see your point, but I don't really think it's too unique that SOME of the population has irrational fears. Your analogy would be that by 1961 there weren't still those with fear of Japanese (not that by the mid-1980s there we policies allowing them to build cars in the US) or by the late-1960s there weren't still those with fear of the Soviets. 

 

In both cases, there most certainly were. 

[NoCalMike]

13 minutes ago, TD_washingtonredskins said:

 

I guess I see your point, but I don't really think it's too unique that SOME of the population has irrational fears.

 

For me the uncanny part was that the whole muslim ban rhetoric got so much traction in 2016 when every study in existence shows that fear of a terrorist attack from Muslims trying to "sneak into the country" is pretty irrational.  Since 9/11 it has pretty much been Caucasian domestic terrorists with guns doing the attacking.

 

When Bush was running for re-election in 2004, I could have seen a Muslim ban or some form of it being used as a campaign issue because 9/11 was still fresh in our minds, plus the Afgan & Iraq wars were still somewhat in their infancy, but even with all that going on, something as ludicrous as a muslim ban was not proposed, so how the hell did it gain traction in 2016?  I think the pattern with Trump is really about "brown = bad" moreso than muslims themselves, because he seems to be hostile to any/every group of people with a darker shade of skin. It brings up an interesting question about something like the Patriot Act, if it hadn't been passed so soon after 9/11 when people were so willing to give up more freedoms in exchange for a perceived need for safety....would something like that every be able to get passed now?

Edited September 11, 2019 by NoCalMike

[TD_washingtonredskins]

2 minutes ago, NoCalMike said:

 

For me the uncanny part was that the whole muslim ban rhetoric got so much traction in 2016 when every study in existence shows that fear of a terrorist attack from Muslims trying to "sneak into the country" is pretty irrational.  Since 9/11 it has pretty much been Caucasian domestic terrorists with guns doing the attacking.

 

When Bush was running for re-election in 2004, I could have seen a Muslim ban or some form of it being used as a campaign issue because 9/11 was still fresh in our minds, plus the Afgan & Iraq wars were still somewhat in their infancy, but even with all that going on, something as ludicrous as a muslim ban was not proposed, so how the hell did it gain traction in 2016?  I think the pattern with Trump is really about "brown = bad" moreso than muslims themselves, because he seems to be hostile to any/every group of people with a darker shade of skin. It brings up an interesting question about something like the Patriot Act, if it hadn't been passed so soon after 9/11 when people were so willing to give up more freedoms in exchange for a perceived need for safety....would something like that every be able to get passed now?

 

I don't disagree that the Muslim ban is bad...

 

But it's a slippery slope to assume that every Trump voter endorses every idea he has. Many people voted in 2016 AGAINST one side or the other, not FOR anyone. 

[NoCalMike]

3 minutes ago, TD_washingtonredskins said:

 

I don't disagree that the Muslim ban is bad...

 

But it's a slippery slope to assume that every Trump voter endorses every idea he has. Many people voted in 2016 AGAINST one side or the other, not FOR anyone. 

 

True, but Trump had to beat out, what....10 other people?  And guess what, most of those establishment GOP candidates for the most part would have delivered the same tax cuts, the same conservative supreme court justices, likely similar rollbacks to Obama's environmental protections etc etc etc.....the only thing Trump has added is the racism, bigotry, stupidity, narcissism, etc etc etc.......all things considered, if you take away his horrendous attributes, his policy still aligns with a lot of the mainstream GOP.  So it still boggles my mind why he was seen as the best choice.   

[Elessar78]

1 hour ago, TD_washingtonredskins said:

 

I don't mean to turn the 9/11 thread into a debate, but do you truly believe there's still a "blanket fear of Muslims" in the US? 

I live in MAGA country. Things I've heard people say about muslims, in a professional work environment, convince me this is the case. 

[LastMortal2]

Guess what NC republican legislators were doing today while democrats were attending the 9-11 ceremony?

 

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article234962017.html

 

House overrides budget veto in surprise vote with almost half of lawmakers absent

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article234962017.html#storylink=cpy

[Cooleyfan1993]

Wow. Crazy to think it happened just 18 years ago. 

 

Got into a twitter debate with morons today about 9/11, actually. On a tweet by the NFL about a Chargers player who will be out for a long time with an injury. This one guy says “worst September 11th ever smh”. So i said that’s not funny and that hopefully that’s an attempt at a REALLY, REALLY crappy joke. A few other morons chimed in with “oh come on it’s funny!” And I’m like “no..no it’s not. People lost their lives....” and apparently one guy is telling me that the guy was being sarcastic, and that “132 others liked the joke, yet i seemed to be the only one who didn’t understand it”. 

 

Just seems like a really poor attempt at sarcasm or a joke or whatever it was.....

[Mr. Sinister]

I don't feel anything anymore, and thats even with thinking I lost my dad that day (he worked at the Pentagon but was away from his office dropping off a rental. His office was one of the areas that was hit).

 

Nearly every rotten thing going on in this country today can be traced back to that day. I hate even thinking about it anymore. I would probably start to feel sick.

 

 

 

[Renegade7]

37 minutes ago, Mr. Sinister said:

I don't feel anything anymore, and thats even with thinking I lost my dad that day (he worked at the Pentagon but was away from his office dropping off a rental. His office was one of the areas that was hit).

 

Nearly every rotten thing going on in this country today can be traced back to that day. I hate even thinking about it anymore. I would probably start to feel sick.

2

 

The 10 year anniversary felt kinda like an "everything we've been through" moment, especially since we had finally killed Bin Laden a few months earlier.  The 20 year anniversary, it will be a real look back at everything we've done since that day, and it won't be pretty.

[Bozo the kKklown]

 

“Founded on Judeo-Christian principles...”

 

13 hours ago, Mr. Sinister said:

I don't feel anything anymore, and thats even with thinking I lost my dad that day (he worked at the Pentagon but was away from his office dropping off a rental. His office was one of the areas that was hit).

 

Nearly every rotten thing going on in this country today can be traced back to that day. I hate even thinking about it anymore. I would probably start to feel sick.

 

 

 

 

12 hours ago, Renegade7 said:

 

The 10 year anniversary felt kinda like an "everything we've been through" moment, especially since we had finally killed Bin Laden a few months earlier.  The 20 year anniversary, it will be a real look back at everything we've done since that day, and it won't be pretty.

 

Quote

In the decades since 911, we have become a nation where, as an American, you must put aside your freedom a dozen times a day. You must show your papers. You must submit to naked body scanners and you must allow unsmiling uniformed men with the force of secret laws behind them to grope the most intimate areas of your children and yourselves. Such has become the price of freedom in America. 

 

We have become a nation  where you – as an American – can be detained for a glance or a gesture or a careless word or for checking out the wrong book from the library or for worshipping the wrong God.  We have become a nation where the only acceptable response to uniformed authority is immediate and total submission. Talk back, question, stand pat on the rights of previous generations and you’ll be branded an enemy. 

 

We have become a nation that claims to revere liberty and justice, but believes those things can only be had when secret agencies monitor our every email and our every communication without warrant or probable cause. 

 

We have become a nation where parents buy bulletproof backpacks for their children as part of their school supplies. 

 

We have become a nation that turns away the desperate and the needy, a nation that puts children in cages and lets women sit in their own menstrual blood because we don’t even have the minimum empathy to provide sanitary napkins or even flu shots to sick children.

 

More in the link

http://www.stonekettle.com/2019/09/scabs.html

 

This country wasn’t good before 9-11 but it’s now gone into hellscape mode.

[BatteredFanSyndrome]

Yes, I'm a cynical a-hole.  Was everyone else's social media filled with "never forget" stuff all day long?  I just find it to be a weird slogan, that folks feel the need to share and repost to consider themselves a 'patriot'.  I think it pretty much goes without saying that everyone who was alive at the time will never forget it.  I'd imagine those who lost loved ones in this tragedy don't feel any better about it because everyone says they'll never forget it.  To me "never forget" is just another way of saying "keep hating muslims".

 

EDIT: I posted this before reading the actual thread.  Now that I'm reading through, I feel better about my cynicism.

Edited September 12, 2019 by BatteredFanSyndrome

[Llevron]

12 minutes ago, BatteredFanSyndrome said:

Yes, I'm a cynical a-hole.  Was everyone else's social media filled with "never forget" stuff all day long?  I just find it to be a weird slogan, that folks feel the need to share and repost to consider themselves a 'patriot'.  I think it pretty much goes without saying that everyone who was alive at the time will never forget it.  I'd imagine those who lost loved ones in this tragedy don't feel any better about it because everyone says they'll never forget it.  To me "never forget" is just another way of saying "keep hating muslims".

 

Thats exactly what it is.