I'm one of those ordinary citizenry who is not even remotely connected to what happened to 9/11. I don't know anyone who died in the plan attacks to the sites. I don't know anyone connected to the illness from the rescue in the World Trade Center. I'm only affected by it only as a result of all the rules and regulations changes in the aftermath of 9/11; mostly in the airport checks, long lines of waiting, and delays. That's about it. I'm pretty much a spectator in the whole chains of events.
But I remember it well on that day.
I was working in office in a suburban office building. I went about it like any other regular mornings. And then my colleagues called out to me, saying we need to go to the conference room. We thought it's some ad-hoc all-hands meeting. Since there was a few rounds of layoffs already (as a result of the 2000 tech bubble burst), we thought the most that could come of it was another round of layoff announcement. We were walking in there, along the corridor in single file. We were even chitchatting, joking and had a few laughs. The big conference room had a very large TV, and it's on when we walked in. It's tuned to CNN news live, but at the time, I didn't realize it's news. The first picture I saw was the first World Trade Center tower in smoke. I remember asking one of my colleagues, "what is this?" And then, one of them realized what's going on, and said the WTC was burning. No one even knew that it's hit by a plane. The newscast was somewhat confusing, and none of us was watching the TV before we filed in to the conference room. That picture on the TV was so picture-perfect, we couldn't believe it's real. Another colleague commented that, it looked like a perfect Hollywood movie, with the perfectly clear blue sky in the background, all the details of the bellowing black smoke from the building came out so starkly clear on the high-def TV. Some of us were talking about factual details of WTC, like one of them talking about how many floors WTC had; that one of the brothers of her best friend worked there; etc etc. So, the some twenty of us, standing around the room, watching the TV for maybe 30 minutes or so, with not much details from the news, decided that we've watched enough; and we went back to our cube.
It's never occurred to me at the time the enormity of the event. A little while later, someone yelled out, the second tower was hit. This time, we rushed back to conference room, and saw smoke AND fire coming from the WTC towers. And then, we realized, "oh my God, it's real." We stayed on for some more time. This time, our boss came in, and said, we can't be standing here watching this. So, we went back to our cube one more time.
Even though we knew it's real, it's so surreal that our senses and emotions did not kick in. It's only until the next day, when the news of events of that day had settled in, that I realize how bad it was. A few days later, we filed back to the same conference room for the third and the last time, for the sake of 9/11 during lunch (and our boss didn't say anything this time - it's just lunch time afterall). The images from CNN were those from the ground. The towers were coming down and collapsing; people on the street were yelling, screaming and running away from it; huge clouds of dark dust and smoke in their wake. It's when I saw those images, that for some reason, my tears started coming down. People were dying; this was not a Hollywood movie afterall; and there's nothing I could do about it.
That's what I remember of 9/11.
In the aftermath, I learn from some colleagues, who learnt from their customers, that anyone in the IT field who had the first inkling of someone amiss is the hot link of backups between the financial firms (those with offices in the World Trade Center) and a major IT tech firm (who manages their hot backup) started having red lights flashing everywhere. That's when the original site's system is down, and hot backup is requested/required. It's more than coincidental that all the firms are having problems at the same time. The staff was thinking it must have been power grid failure or something. No one would even remotely think that the whole buildings were gone.
Sometimes, I try to empathize and re-imagine how it's like on the other side of the terrorist's jihad. The muslims were angry at the west for bombing and killing their own people. Even to this day, in the name of the war on terror, soldiers from the west were bombing and raiding different middle eastern countries like Afghanistan. Their people are sometimes taken or kidnapped for questioning and subject to torture practice, with no recourse. Sometimes I imagine myself in their shoes; I have to say, I'll probably get very angry too. Those are the times when militant groups and extremists like Osama bin Laden are able to exploit the underdogs' emotions, to recruits people to join their jihad against the west.
To that end, even though bin Laden was now killed, he had largely succeeded in dividing the muslim public (and their public opinion), and the western world. He had also succeeded in terrorizing the western world, making it looking its shoulders at every turn. And he had succeeded in making his name a legend for evading capture for so long; and a legacy (almost a blueprint) for future jihadist to model after. It's tremendously sad that this would be what 9/11 has amounted to.
I'm not too well-versed in the long history of Israel and Muslim. Perhaps this would be the time, post 9/11, for the Israelis to tell us all, that this is exactly what they've been living with, the constant worry and fear of bombs and destruction, and the forever vigilance that they mount against the muslim countries around Israel.
It's taken decades for the terrorist activities in plane hijacks back back in the 1970s to recede. Sometimes I wonder if the current sentiment ever comes to pass.
