Posts from This Journal by “flag waving” Tag

  • Let us remember

    Every Memorial day I find myself astonished all over again that despite a pretty high number of known relatives who served in various branches of…

  • Over for another year

    Oh, how I despise the whole income tax everything, start to finish. Abolish the 16th amendment! Talk about a rhetorical device that seriously…

  • "Everyone helped everyone"

I had just been laid off. I was thinking about calling unemployment and surfing on the net when I heard of a plane hitting WTC. I thought it meant a little plane, but I still went and ate breakfast because I was already not in the best mood.

Then my sister called me and told me to turn the TV on.

I succeeded in calling unemployment on Friday.
I remember the mass confusion. There were a lot of wild rumors -- I remember one about a truck and a NYC bridge -- and the one about a plane going down in a Pennsylvania field was just one of them.

Then Jerry Pournelle posted an email from the father of one of the men on that plane.

People were asking him whether he had contacted the news media.
The general confusion and inability to comprehend what was happening is really what I remember most clearly about it all.
(Anonymous)
I spent the day with my three very young children and two sisters-in-law in Kansas City, MO. My husband was attending a conference, and we drove from NY as a family instead of him flying so that the cousins could meet. My SIL had the TV turned on when we arrived to what I thought at first was a violent movie. We sent the kids to another room, then took everyone to the zoo after a few hours.

The remainder of the conference was cancelled, and most attendees were stranded, but we drove back to New York (hour north of NYC) at the end of the week. Almost every overpass on the highway had flags draped over the bridges, and we were passed by hundreds of trucks with labels on them indicating that they were full of donations from various States.
About a week ago I came across a 10-minute oral history about the boat evacuation of Manhattan island in the wake of the first tower collapsing--the Coast Guard put out a general call of "if you have a boat and want to help, meet up at these coordinates" and within minutes they were surrounded by more boats than the crew had ever seen in one place before. And everyone interviewed said the same thing: they couldn't not help. Not when there were so many people in need of rescue.

Had me weeping all over my keyboard.