• Welcome to Autism Forums, a friendly forum to discuss Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, High Functioning Autism and related conditions.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Private Member only forums for more serious discussions that you may wish to not have guests or search engines access to.
    • Your very own blog. Write about anything you like on your own individual blog.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon! Please also check us out @ https://www.twitter.com/aspiescentral

What were you doing on September 11, 2001

Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I agree completely, LYTM: there was an unreality to it. I felt numb & almost like I was in a dream. The news kept replaying the ghastly scenes involving the planes hitting the towers so it seemed like it was happening over & over.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

In middle school, geography class. The class stopped and the instructor turned on the TV. Of course, I was reading a book (not my textbook), so it took me about five minutes to realize what was going on.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I was at work - ironically, in the financial services industry.

I'm trying to remember where I was when I found out - I remember running into a TV in public somewhere, the mall near my then-workplace? Why would there have been a TV there, though?
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I was sitting in the living room watching TV with my mom after she woke up,and she was flipping through channels when we saw what happened on the news. I was a bit too young to really understand it all.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

Soup said:
I agree completely, LYTM: there was an unreality to it. I felt numb & almost like I was in a dream. The news kept replaying the ghastly scenes involving the planes hitting the towers so it seemed like it was happening over & over.
Click to expand...
it did feel like a dream or a "movie" at first. I hated that they kept replaying it over and over again. I believe we finally turned off the tv because we couldn't take it anymore.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I had just came home from school and were doing homeworks/doodling in my room as mom came home. She sounded frightened and asked if I knew what terrible had happened. Nope. She insisted me to watch news from tv and ...and I bursted laughing. She was so angry at me because she thought I was glad for Americans dying.
I was just happy and relieved that her "terrible" piece of news wasn't something like by brother would've been killed in a road accident or such.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I woke up for work later that morning and turned the TV on. They were playing the image of the towers collapsing.

At first it did not dawn on me what was happening - I was half asleep.

After a moment I realized what was happening and I freaked out! I could not believe it.

I had to go to work so I got ready; When I left and went outside it was like a ghost-town (and this was in a very busy part of town.)

I am still shocked when I see footage of the towers falling.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

Makes you wonder what the hell it'll be next time. these types of people do not value the loss of their own lives in the same way loss of life is repugnant to most (not all) Western thinkers of virtually all faiths (or Atheists). Once a person believes that their life is nothing in comparison to some greater cause, that they will become heroic figures & their families will be elevated & cared for & furthermore that they will e richly divinely rewarded, there is little one can do to invoke fear in them. What do you do to a suicidal brainwashed fanatic: threaten him with some kind of 'death penalty'?!? That is what he WANTS! It will serve to underscore how corrupt the west is & inspire others. If we imprison him & keep him alive, he becomes a symbol of resistance & western oppression.

As a combat tactic, this one (however much westerners find it revolting) is formidable. It permits a single individual or a handful of them to inflict a tremendous amount of harm with little real accountability & at a relatively low price: a ratty old jalopy & some plastique & BOOM! The attacker could appear to be a teen boy,a businessman, a woman with a baby...he may look white, he may look Black or Indonesian...there is no one single 'look' or uniform. Even kids & dogs have been used for this purpose. In WWII, Russia used dogs this way. They were starved & trained to associate food with the underside of certain military vehicles. The dogs were fitted with explosives & then released at the right time to run under a German military vehicle. Once there, a soldier, using a remote control would detonate the explosive blowing both the poor dog AND the opponent to Pluto. Suicide attacks are by no means new: what IS new is that we Westerners are now being targeted by this tactic that our ethics render taboo.

I'm not saying that WE need to begin training soldiers to use this tactic, however. We westerners make a differentiation between combatants & civilians (what we call 'innocent people'). In many other places, no such distinction is made: we are guilty by association since it is OUR armies, our governments that WE voted into office & We appear to be doing nothing to stop them or affect a change in our nations' foreign policies. the thing is, few regular folks in any Western country even have a clue as to what our foreign policies even are & in what ways they're perceived as punitive & exploitative by other countries. Even if we do, knowing what policies would be preferable & how to affect this change is beyond us.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I was on a platform in the Barcelona Subway. The day I visited the Sagrada Fam?lia.
They had big TVs for advertising and the like. And they showed video of the Towers with smoke. Everything in Spanish, so I didn't understand the details.
Was it a movie trailer?

Then we bumped into to American Tourists. "This is a movie, right?". But they told us it was real, and that put the dread into me. "This is going to be bad."
We got so hooked on watching CNN news in our hotel room that I had to turn it off. It was getting obsessive. The same footage and opinions going round and round in circles.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I will never forget that horrible day as long as I live. I was 9, and this was back when my family traveled for dad's work. We were in a very small town called Chugwater, Wyoming. I was homeschooled back then, and that day was a bit of a field trip day to the local library for a story reading time. I don't know what the story was, but I know the story time went fine without any interruptions. As my mom and I were heading back to our home, our neighbor literally stopped us in the driveway. She was hysterical, and I had no clue what she was talking about. She was terrified that terrorists were gonna attack all fifty states. My mom and I went inside and quickly turned on our tv, and it was on every channel. As a 9 year old, I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but I was terrified. My mom tried to call my dad, but he didn't answer, because he was at work. I think the second plane had already hit, but the towers were still standing when we first turned on our tv. Then the plane hit the Pentagon, and another was missing, and then the Towers collapsed...I will never forget that...It was horrific. I was afraid for weeks afterward, because it was on the news for weeks, and we could never look away.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I'm really not bothered about 9/11. I'm English anyway, and I was only like 3 years old when that happened. I naturally have a lack of empathy due to Asperger's so I don't "feel" for the victims or their families.
 
Re: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01

I was working at the animal hospital at that time and was washing and drying a dog. Much like the post above, I too was not really affected by the whole ordeal.
 
I remember very well. I was visiting my parents (I was in college back then), decided to take a nap. I saw a dream: for some reason I really wanted to go to New-York, I was actually in the sky, trying to get there, but the closer I got the "heavier" air was getting. I was almost there but I heard a voice or something, telling me to stop, I wouldn't be able to move any closer anyway because of smoke and some dark clouds, so I went back. When I woke up and went to the living room, my parents told me what happened.

As for my reaction... It's hard to say... One thing that was obvious right away, that there was going to be pretty hard for the country to recover after such a shock and that the war was imminent. But the feeling was odd, as if the death itself was staring in billions of people faces and reminding them how small they really are. I know people die every day but events like this are different... I didn't feel sad, angry or anything... Just a realization of imminence of death... That's it.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
For those of us that are old enough to remember, where were you and what were you doing when the events of 9/11 happened?

I was supposed to have an interview at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in SE Washington that afternoon. I was in bed when I got a phone call from the contractor filling that position at the EPA. He told me they were canceling the interview. When I asked why, he said, "Turn on your TV." I turned on WGAL-TV in Lancaster, PA to the Today Show. When I saw what was happening, I said, "Oh, s***!", got back on the phone with the contractor and said, "I see what you mean!" I had nightmares about those events for the next 6 months, just like the nightmares I had with girls back in high school.
 
I was in college and lived pretty close to NYC at the time. I woke up to the radio saying the twin towers were hit by planes and I saw it on tv and couldn't believe what a disaster had occurred. My school actually kept classes open that day. A friend of mine watched the towers fall from a building on campus. I later went into school and there was barely anyone there. The professor gave the few of us who were there extra credit and said to go home and she couldn't believe classes were still scheduled on the worst day in US history. Later in the week that followed some of the firemen who went into the city to help were coming back with massive amounts of what looked like ash all over their vehicles. Very strange week altogether. I was devastated once those towers fell.
 
I was in middle school. 8th grade. I didn't know until I was on my school campus: My first period of class was band, and one of my bullies "jokingly" asked me if I did it. My band director immediately told him to knock it off in an impatient tone, and I couldn't figure out why until I looked at the TV in our classroom.

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME. Stupid and sickening.
 
Please bare in mind that I am British, not American.


I was a child still attending school at the time it happened, most likely I was either studying or bullying neural typicals as was the status quo at our school.

However, I doubt I'll ever forget what happened when I got home that day.

There was no one to welcome me home, but there was a large commotion and a great deal of shouting coming from the garden.

It was celebratory party. There were a lot of family and friends of the family there that I had never met before, as well as some neighbors and businessmen in suits. It was an odd and very confusing day for a young autistic child, one that I didn't make sense of until many years later.

The reason why so many British people celebrate 9/11 with such fervor and gusto, is because it pretty much single-handedly killed the America's right to control it's own commercial and economic functions.

When savvy American Businessmen say that Britain is the sole reason America is in so much debt, they're no lying, and 9/11 is the reason why.

Before 9/11 American economical analysts predicted that the Dollar would be worth twice as much as the Pound. The exchange rate nowadays is ?1.00 = $1.56, and there was a time before 2008 when it was two Dollars to the Pound.

Unfortunately, the American government is now painfully aware that it no longer has control over it's own country, in fact Britain's control over America was considered one of the biggest public secrets in the world a couple of years ago.

George W. Bush, arguably the most self-sacrificing President of the United States, instituted great many policies and even started a war with the goal of improving America's steadily worsening situation. Many Americans and British alike hold him primarily responsible for the fall/rise in currency exchange from ?1.00 = $2.10 to ?1.00 = $1.40, celebrated by the former and cursed by the latter.

Barack Obama has done a great deal to reverse much of what George W. Bush started and is paying for it in spades. While a Democratic President (even an informed one) isn't much trouble, a Republican President is a very real and genuine threat to Britain's continued control of America.

For good reason did Britain support the North in the American Civil War, and it had nothing to do with emancipation and slavery.
 
Craig said:
Please bare in mind that I am British, not American.


I was a child still attending school at the time it happened, most likely I was either studying or bullying neural typicals as was the status quo at our school.

However, I doubt I'll ever forget what happened when I got home that day.

There was no one to welcome me home, but there was a large commotion and a great deal of shouting coming from the garden.

It was celebratory party. There were a lot of family and friends of the family there that I had never met before, as well as some neighbors and businessmen in suits. It was an odd and very confusing day for a young autistic child, one that I didn't make sense of until many years later.

The reason why so many British people celebrate 9/11 with such fervor and gusto, is because it pretty much single-handedly killed the America's right to control it's own commercial and economic functions.

When savvy American Businessmen say that Britain is the sole reason America is in so much debt, they're no lying, and 9/11 is the reason why.

Before 9/11 American economical analysts predicted that the Dollar would be worth twice as much as the Pound. The exchange rate nowadays is ?1.00 = $1.56, and there was a time before 2008 when it was two Dollars to the Pound.
Click to expand...
This is definitely a new perspective (new to me, I mean.)
 
I was 32 at the time. I'd been out with friends for a few beers on the night before and I slept up until about 6pm on the tuesday it happened. I got up, had a cup of tea and phoned my mum and she sounded strange. When i asked her if she was alright she told me that the towers had collapsed and that there were lots of casualties. Soon after i switched on my TV and saw the footage. I'd been on anti-anxiety medication for years and I took a pill to try and cope with the shock. Luckily my friend from the flat below came up and we sat for several hours smoking, drinking tea to calm our nerves as we watched the unfolding news coverage. At that point I actually thought there were tens of thousands of people that had been killed which by any standards is horrific. One of the worst bits of footage was the fireballs as the planes hit the towers which was the exact time of death for the hundreds of innocent people on board. It still makes me shudder even to this day.
 
I was sitting in a GED class to help me go take my test. I had gotten a diploma but because of my learning disability I had gotten a special diploma. I wanted to take regular college classes but couldn't without also having a GED. While sitting in class that day, one of my classmates got a phone call on their cell phone from a family member or a friend (don't know which) and when he got off the phone that is when he told us about the first tower being hit. My teacher then told us all to go home for the day to be with family and friends. At the time, my mom was also taking college classes. We always met at the same place every day so I headed over there. It was in the middle of a court yard. One side had the library and the other class rooms with glass windows and TV's. That is where i watched the second tower get hit. We raced to go get my brother from high school and went home to watch the rest of the terror unfold. People jumping, both towers falling, the pentagon being hit, the plan crashing in PA. After that, it's all just a blur. I certainly had to have fallen into a state of shock at what was going on in the world.

I had actually started a thread about this last year: Where were you the day the world stopped? 9/11/01


Moderator Note:

Threads merged due to similarity ; ]

Thank you
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You must log in or register to reply here.

New Threads

Top Bottom