I was just coming downstairs from my dorm room at UK and saw on TV in the dorm lobby after the first tower had already been hit...and the first thing I thought of was the 1945 incident I once read about in the World Almanac about a plane accidentally hitting the Empire State Building (which only damaged a small portion of the building). So naturally I figured it was probably a similar situation. Then of course when I saw the other tower get hit...   This of course was my generation's Pearl Harbor or JFK.

Hard to believe that already, we will now have people starting to come of legal age who were born after 9/11. To them 9/11 will just be a history book sort of thing. It's much different if you were there and can never forget where you were when it happened.   I sure hope and pray nothing again like this happens in my lifetime, but that's probably over optimistic.    Because after an incident like this or JFK or Pearl Harbor, it's like the US and perhaps to an extent the world can never agan be quite the same.  

BTW, one of the best coverages of 9/11 as it happened, believe it or not...came from a VERY unlikely source (and one of Howard's guests do in fact bring up the 1945 plane crash into the Empire State Building:

And here is what future President Donald Trump thought of all this...




And as Mister Rogers here explains just under a year and a half before he sadly passed away...in any kind of sad tragic sorts of events like 9/11, look for the helpers.

It's definitely one of those events that you remember where you were when you heard about it. As for kids being born after, my 17 year old asked me a couple of weeks ago if we use 911 as a standard emergency call number because of 9/11. My first thought was that it was a silly question. From her perspective though, I can see why she would wonder that being born after the fact.

The sad day in American history is "nine eleven"...the emergency number is "nine one one".  I forgot to mention this FWIW but also remember at the time there was no social media, smartphones, YouTube, internet itself was still fairly new.  Sort of like how I told my wife a few times regarding the 1989 SF earthquake that occured shortly before Game 3 of the World Series was supposed to start...the people inside Candlestick (because the stadium didn't get hardly damaged at all) probably thought the quake was "just another four pointer" or something.  There was no way anyone at that game (remember no smartphones, social media, Internet, etc) could have any idea how bad the quake really was.

I work with these 18 year olds. They think Joe Rogan is a conspiracy theorist podcaster who became famous when he smoked a joint with Elon Musk.

They also think the Moon Landing was in the 80s, "Back when JFK was President"

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/1q9...

I posted this on my Facebook wall this morning, in my opinion probably the greatest moment in Comedy Central history

I remember sitting in my Physics class, Sr year of high school and turning it on the projector. I was numb to the significance of the event out of complete shock. Their was a brief restoration of humanity after this event when people of differing views came together for a common good. It's a far cry from where we are today. We should never forget that despite or differences, we are all human beings and should treat each other with dignity and respect.

I hope those born after 9/11 live out that message despite not experiencing that brief moment of human charity.

I think I was heading off to art class in high school when I was approached by a friend of mine who told me a plane flew(s) into the twin towers.

Didn't think much of it, as I didn't know what the twin towers were at the time. I thought she was talking about a small crop duster plane flew into a random building. It wasn't until the next day when I got more information and the gravity of it all.

I watch the howard stern episode every year of this day. I think it captures the shock, horror, confusion, etc. Remember that no one really knew what was going on. Were there more planes to come? Was there bombs planted at other hard targets? Etc. I was in 5th grade when it happened and I remember it vividly. Im from NJ so Ive known/met alot of people directly affected by it.

It is also weird to think about the kids Im in college with (went back to change careers) didn't experience this first hand. It must be what my grandparents felt with something like JFK assassination and how I never lives through it. Its a very strange feeling

In a few months all teenagers will have been born in the year 2000 or later.

Yeah crazy day, I was in high school and we watched the videos all day. Such a tragic time but also a time that we rallied together as a country.

In terms of not fully understanding events you haven't lived through, that is true sadly. No way to teach wisdom.

That precisely what Mister Rogers told us to do in response to 9/11...in any sort of sad tragic situation like this, look for the people helping.





And this wasn't the first time either...seriously I don't care how much of a tough alpha male you think you are...your heart WILL break and you WILL feel really sad at 2:48 when Daniel Striped Tiger asks Lady Aberlin about well, a certain new not-so-nice word just added to his vocabulary.  




 

Silly kids...we never landed on the moon!

Same here was in high school, I think a keyboarding class of all things, and the teacher turned on the TV frantically and we saw the 2nd plane hit live (I think it was live).

Was hard to understand the magnitude of what went down at that time, next thing you know parents were pulling their kids and taking them home and chaos ensued.

I worked at a Burger King at the time, and that night, I spent my entire shift driving coworkers cars to gas stations, waiting in the LONG lines, and filling up their cars.

Everyone was simply freaking out. Beyond that I'll stay quiet as I'm labeled a "9/11 truther" which I could go on and on and on and on and on about...

Yep. They're having sex. And you're old.

I remember getting breaking news alerts on my pager as we were huddled around the break room TV at work.

Also, CNN.com was getting so many hits that they finally just threw out some black and white pages with updates, no graphics or colors or anything.
 

I imagine if not the whole Internet, at least the major social media places (FB, YT, etc) would be completely crashed for several days.

And here is an idea of how some of the non-news channels reacted, some even suspended programming.

I doubt it.  Bandwidth is exponentially better than it was 18 years ago.
 

Yeah, they're set up for that type of event. They would handle it no problem.



 

I sure hope so...I especially hope there never again has to be a reason to handle that kind of thing, at least not in my lifetime. I know that's being overly optimistic but one can only hope and pray.

I still can't get over how creepy this particular 9/11 prediction was (I know there's billions of them but hardly anyone knows about this one):

http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess...

I was sitting in Bio my freshman year of high school when we first heard about it. One of the guidance counselors ran in and said what happened. Because this was a Connecticut school in the tri-state area, a lot of our parents worked in NYC, so the guidance counselor asked people to try to remember where in the city everyone's parents worked. At the time I didn't have a sense of the layout of NYC so knowing the WTC was hit didn't resolve any confusion. I had my dad's business card on hand for emergencies and said his address and felt relieved when I was told he was probably ok. That gave way to guilt when the next person said her dad's address and the guidance counselor asked her to come to his office and they'd make some other calls. School was let out soon after. More than a few people from my hometown were in the towers when they were hit.

Oddly enough this was what I had thought happened when I first heard about it at work, some guy passed by telling us a plane flew into a building and I was like "damn..someone sucks at flying" never thought more about it but everyone kept talking about it and time I was able to go home at lunch I knew exactly what had happened but not the full story and had just walked into the house and my wife at the time was watching it and catching me up and right then the first tower fell. 
 

And to think for the longest time the year 2000 was practically a synonium for "the future"...yet this right here is a perfect example of how different things were in terms of communications tech especially. Already the early 2000s (this was my college years mind you) seem so primitive compared to today in so many different ways.   Did I forget to mention there are no kids today that were even so much as born before 9/11? So they read and learn about 9/11 in school the same way my generation read about JFK and Pearl Harbor in the history books...and I was in elementary school when East Berlin/Eastern Europe were liberated and the USSR collapsed; that too is now a history book thing for today's students in all grade levels. Which if you ask me the end of the Cold War (just before 1992) is just as much a major dividing line in terms of US/Wolrd history eras as the end of WW2 year (1945) was. If you guys weren't around back in the early 90s you have NO idea how much redrawing of the world map there was at the time (especially the break up of the USSR and the break up of Yugoslavia shortly after), the likes of which were not seen since African decolonization in the 50s/60s.

No, I don’t believe you forgot to mention that. I was under the impression that that was the entire point of this thread. You’re obsessed, man!

I was ten. Dad was watching TV before he went to work, he must have yelled to get mom awake because I came awake after that. It was a school day. I remember watching the news with my parents in our old house before we tore it down and built a new one...in that living room with that fat ass big screen TV.

At ten I don't think I really understood it entirely. I knew something bad had happened but not what it fully meant. All I know is crafty little me said I didn't want to go to school because I was "scared" I really wasn't but I wanted a day off. I got my day off and went back to bed.