I was watching 60 Minutes tonight about robots and 9-11 and saw pictures of the waterfalls and carved names of the victims at ground zero and heard about the memorial being built underneath the waterfalls and carved names there.
So, the Two towers location is now Hallowed Ground in that since most human bodies were turned to dust and powder there last resting place is there and the people there say you can feel how this place is hallowed ground for the world. People from 90 different countries died there on 9-11-2001.
My memories of this event (since I was near San Francisco in California at the time were of my wife waking me up and saying to me because she got scared, "Fred. I think you need to get up I can't figure out if this is real or a movie I'm watching but it says it is CNN?"
So, just like whenever my wife feels in danger I got up to be supportive. Soon, I said, "Oh. It looks like a plane ran into the World TRade Center in New York. The commentators talked about how a private plane could have made this mistake. So, we were watching the smoke come out of the building. But, soon footage came in of the plane coming in and people said, "Oh. This isn't a small plane this is a passenger plane filled with people. How Awful!" Then as we watched horrified as the building burned we saw fire engines coming down streets to get there with movies of people looking up and crying that a passenger plane had hit the World Trade Center.
Then another plane came into view and the commentator said, "What's this new plane doing in this airspace? It shouldn't be there should it?" At which point it crashed into the second tower and people who were commentators were trying to control their emotions so as not to completely freak out hundreds of millions of people watching this on CNN around the world by this time. It was worse than a train wreck in slow motion. By the time the second plane hit the second tower everyone knew it was some kind of attack on the U.S. People starting crying that were shown in clips on the ground at that point. I don't think I've seen as many terrified people at one time before in my life (except maybe during a 7.1 Earthquake or above in California when people all thought they were going to die). But other than that more people were more scared and horrified out of their minds than at any time I had seen before at the unknown. Because no one knew if more planes were going to keep crashing into buildings because everyone knew it was some kind of attack from someone or some nation at this point.
The only similar thing that people had ever heard about would be Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941.
At this point the fire on the first tower got worse and went up and people on the roof who were suffering smoke inhalation and couldn't breathe and were beginning to be roasted alive on the roof realized there was no one coming to save them before they were going to be burned alive. So, if you know how painful it is to die from burning you too might have made the same choice as they did. It is less painful to jump off a building than to be incinerated on top of it. So, they jumped! Most people died of a heart attack on the way down before they hit the ground because this kind of thing isn't survivable for most people once they jumped. Many people did this and bodies were falling all over and hitting the sidewalk, the cars, and in the streets around Tower 1.
The next thing that happened is tower 1 collapsed which surprised everyone but possibly some engineers who understood this might happen under these circumstances. And then everyone who could ran away from the collapse. Some made it and some didn't. many of those who didn't survive were policemen and firemen. Some jumped into stores and shops so they wouldn't be suffocated by the cement dust that choked everyone. People who took their shirts or handerchiefs over their faces lived by filtering out the dust. People who didn't do this often died sooner or later because of dust in their lungs and other long term health effects.
As the nation and world watched on horrified on CNN and every other national and international TV network Then the second tower went down just like the first one and the world has never been the same.
Airplanes (passenger) were being used as missiles to bring down buildings and warfare was never going to be the same again, sort of like when bullets and arrows from longbows brought down men in armor and cannons brought down castles, warfare would never be the same again. A relative age of innocence for the human race had permanently ended.
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