What Do You Remember of September 11, 2001?
Was it the Day World War III Began?
About one year ago my daughter Jasmine was given a class assignment to talk to her parents about their memories of 9/11 and write about it. It is strange to consider that she wasn’t alive then but of course she wasn’t. I gave her my account from Ohio and her father gave her his from California. As the anniversary of the day nears I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
Did I think anything about the official story was off that day? I suppose I did, but most of it didn’t come together until years in hindsight. One thing that is odd is that September 11, 2001 is the first time in my life I ever noticed chemtrails. It was because of their lack of them.
Toledo, Ohio
I woke up that morning at my on again off again boyfriend’s house. Me and John had been broken up all summer but then he invited me to his daughter’s 10th birthday party and we had a reconciliation. It was one of the last times, though we had been so on again off again for so long that I think everybody thought we were going to go on forever like that. I was already fixing up my trailor to live in and didn’t keep so much as a toothbrush in his house by that point. I had one graduate school class at BGSU scheduled for that day at 10:30 AM. John was supposed to work but he called in sick that morning.
He was laying in bed watching Jerry Springer on television when the image cut to that of a smoking airplane sticking out of a tall skyscraper.
“It appears and airplane has hit one of the Twin Towers in New York.” The befuddled newscaster said. Neither of us knew what to make of this. He changed the channel and there was that same image. He tried to change it to MTV but the image was even on the music television station. We watched on supposed live TV as the second plane hit the towers.
John called his sister immediately and told her to turn on the tv. Then he called some friends and told them to do likewise. We listened for updates on local news. Most colleges had cancelled classes for the day and everybody talked of this being a potential terrorist attack.
I saw tower 2 collapse on television. I wanted to see what it looked like outside. BGSU had not cancelled classes and I left for college.
The 30 mile drive down I-75 was peaceful despite the frantic radio chatter. It looked like any other late summer day in Ohio, except the roads were less crowded than usual. They talked about terrorists flying into the Pentagon and a plane crashing in Pennsylvania. Everybody was on high alert.
My one class was not cancelled, which was an introduction to thesis writing. Everybody in there seemed to want to change their Master’s thesis to something to do with terrorism. “I want to study the ways Muslim extremism plays a role in commiting acts of terror!” One young woman explained passionately.
I did not want to change my thesis over this. “Sociology began with the study of religious differences.” I told her, as I was noting Durkheim’s study of suicide in Catholics versus Protestants. “It’s a good choice.”
Everybody was hovered around televisions in the Student Union with the latest updates of the event. BGSU officially cancelled classes beginning at noon. I couldn’t help but watch them all huddled around TVs in fear. The sky was a sunny blue and the day was perfect looking in Ohio. Perhaps it was a precurser to Covid, but there was one notable difference. On this Op it was Americans against the Islam terrorists instead of everybody being set out to contain a virus that could be in anybody else. In Ohio there was a great sense of community that afternoon. ROTC guys were already talking about volunteering to be part of the rescue and cleanup crew in New York City. Within a few weeks there were busloads of them.
“We’ve been sucker punched!” One man said on the radio frantically. “The terrorists will not have their way!” I was perplexed how in the space of several short hours they were sure that it was Muslim terrorists.
I drove back to Toledo and looked into the clouds on I-75 Northbound. It was the first time I had seen the sky completely clear in I don’t know how long. The grounding of flights nationwide meant that there were no crisscrossing chemtrail streams across the sky. For weeks, maybe months before that they had been like a grid in the sky laying one on top of each other. My pilot friend had told me they were called contrails and were just from all of the overhead flights. But the number of those cloud streams and the dizzying way they had overlaid the sky in the leadup to 9/11 really boggled my mind. How long had they been like that, with so so many? Weeks? Months? Perhaps years as a slow buildup? I’d been across the country enough growing up that I knew that they weren’t always there.
I called BFF 1 and we met for early dinner at a Chinese restaurant. All of the TVs were on the news and across the street the line for the gas station pump was reaching around the corner. People were panic buying in anticipation of the next terrorist attack. I was strangely not worried about that. Me and her talked mostly about other things.
In Thailand I don’t think 9/11 is viewed as anything more than a historical sidenote. They recognize it as a day that was important in American history. That is about it. I’m curious what some of my international audience thought or when you heard about it. I’d have to assume that it was not blasted on every single channel that day to the point where there was nothing else on TV. But what were your thoughts?
The Maui fires led me back to an interesting rabbit hole with Dr. Judy Wood. She claims that September 11 was a DEW attack. This makes surprising sense. For example despite many of my readers knowing full well aabout WTC building 7’s mysterious collapse, did you know about the “fires” in WTC3 through 6?
I consider this the best compilation on September 11, 2001 which I have watched. Unfortunately being over two hours long I haven’t found an easy way to link it directly. But here’s the YouTube link:
And here’s the Rumble one:
Her idea that these towers were energetically changed reminded me of something on all of the still missing in Maui, which is this:
Having relatives who have been cremated in Buddhist style, whose remains were then buried in the ground, I can verify that those bone fragments look like what you’d expect from a normal cremation, which burns at a very hot 2000 F or so for 3-4 hours at least at the Buddhist Wats I’ve been to. So there should be remains.
I think in Castle keep style though they are hiding the extent of their capabilities, leaving it to a cadre of fringe types to dive in, and that they are doing this by having many layers of complexity, which then bogs folks down in their pet theories and rabbit holes. The big picture is perhaps too ugly for most of us to contemplate.
So what do you remember of September 11? I’m curious…
my husband was a first responder and he was tasked with recovery. Part of what he did was sift through the dirt brought to the Staten Island landfill by dump truck. They would dump the dirt and the debris onto a conveyor belt and he would look for human (or possibly) human remains. He found quite a bit of the smaller pieces as they had recovered most of the bigger pieces prior to this. I remember him coming home smelling like death when he handled the actual bodies or the larger pieces of bodies. It was a strange and surreal time.
He also saw the fuselage and smelled that jet fuel on that fateful day.
I was with a crew of guys tearing siding off a house in the west suburbs of Minneapolis. Our boss told us someone blew up the World Trade towers. The homeowner let us in the house to watch the footage. I remember feeling like life in America would be utterly changed, but I had no idea how. It didn't take too long to realize, when they pulled out the full text of the Patriot Act like immediately after, they have been anticipating this. The whole story seemed preposterous, but it wasn't until much later that I dug deeper and was like, this was a set up.
I decided that winter to do something interesting, so in 2002 I spent the entire paddling season soloing the Boundary Waters and Quetico Wilderness, May 01 - Oct 15.