(2001 Thread) Plane just crashed into the world trade center

[julieb]

You're absolutely right... I have been vocal, but now is the time to put my money where my mouth is.

Julie

 

[swalker]

Mr. Cat, Thank you for posting that letter. It is sadening to read and so true of my thoughts. I don't think people can even prepare to comprehend the pain that this has left on our hearts and souls. Living here on the West coast makes me feel desensitized to it all. Having to see those horrible images, and smelling that smell everyone talks about. I don't know how New Yorkers do it. They truly are amazing individuals!

You here about the hate crimes almost everyday now. How embarrassing for Americans. For anybody. We can't tollerate and we most definitely can't learn from our mistakes. Some of these Arab Americans being attacked and bullied have never even been to the Middle East. There are a lot of ignorant people in the world.

Catspride: Thank you for your words. I have always enjoyed reading your thoughts on many different subjects, and this is no different.

 

[hissy]

Written by Graham Nash of Cosby, Stills, Nash & Young and written for the victims of the Oklahoma bombing, but the words are so appropriate for what has happened on 9-11

SOMEWHERE IN HEAVEN, WINGS ARE TAKING FLIGHT
FLYING OVER A WORDLY WEIGHT OF HATRED
HANGING OVER A BUILDING IN THE RAIN

YOU GOT TO HEAVEN, BLOWN ACROSS THE SKY
CRYING OUT FOR THE ANGELS TO HELP YOU
TO RISE UP OUT OF THE ASHES AND THE FLAMES


SEND ME HALF YOUR ANGELS
I'LL SEND YOU HALF OF MINE
HOPE THEY GET THERE IN TIME


FAR BELOW YOUR HEAVEN, HEARTS ARE WONDERING WHY?
WHY WOULD ANYONE HURT GOD'S CHILDREN
HOW COULD ANYONE HARM THEM AT ALL?


WHILE YOU'RE IN HEAVEN, SLEEPING ON THE WIND
ASK YOUR HEART TO FORGIVE THIS EVIL
ASK YOUR SOUL TO FORGIVE US ALL


SEND ME HALF YOUR ANGELS
AND I'LL SEND YOU HALF OF MINE
HOPE THEY GOT THERE IN TIME,

 

[vjoy]

Hi guys...

I just wanted to say I have not said anything here because I cannot read this thread. It is too painful for me.

I do want you all to know that I wish everyone going through the pain healing and love. Just wanted you all to know that just becuase I am not reading this thread, does not mean I don't care. I am just not ready.

Peace....

 

[nena10]

This has been such a painful two weeks. I know someday, New York will be as beautiful as it was before. Instead of thinking of sad songs, why not put Frank Sinatra's New York? I love New York City and I will miss the Twin Towers. But we still have the Empire State Building and The Statue of Liberty. And we still have our freedom. The damn terrorists can't take that away from us! I hope they burn forever in the fires of hell. I am a catholic and belive in forgiveness, but this is too much!!!!! I was a born mexican but I loe America and all that it stands for!!!! I AM HAPPY TO BE AN AMERICAN!!!

 

[vjoy]

I am having a meltdown.... ...

I keep hearing about biochemical attacks...... I can't keep it together...

sorry to vent

 

[dawnt91]

Oh, Val, I'm so sorry you're having such a hard time. I can't even imagine what it must be like to be living in NY right now. The only thing that keeps me going is my faith. Be strong!

 

[mr. cat]

Hang in there! Remember, there will all manner of innuendo, gossip and rumors during this time. Such scare tactics are most often the work of the journalistic media, who know that fear sells their product. Do not be taken in by such stories! The dissemination of frightful "what if" scenarios by the media amounts to giving aid and comfort to the enemy, in this case global terrorism. You will be safe, now more than ever! The officials of government have set aside political differences and are making a maximum effort to safeguard every one of us. Yes, we're in the midst of a national emergency; but we must all believe in the inevitability of a positive outcome.

=^..^=

 

[deb25]

Mr. Cat:

I far from believe that we are safe now. Do you think that a group who would mastermind the events of 9/11 doesn't have other ideas in the works, ready to catch us off guard in another area?

Today on National Public Radio, I listened to just how unprepared we are in the area of vaccines to prepare for a biological assault. If anthrax spores were released over a city, more than a million would die. There is also talk of infecting more "suicide" terrorists with smallpox and letting them roam crowded urban areas just as they are the most contagious.

I believe that this country has a long and hard challenge ahead of it.

 

[vjoy]

Mr. Cat, & Dawn, thanks.

Deb, yes, this is what I am afraid of.

 

[deb25]

Val:

As a native New Yorker, I feel your pain and fear. I have friends among the missing and dead. Eash night I look at a picture of the NY skyline above my bed, and I can still barely believe that what I look upon no longer exists. If other plans are in existence waiting to be carried out, I think each of us in a metropolitan area shares the same anxiety. In Tampa, where I live is MacDill AFB, strategic command for the mideast. New York and Washington made excellent targets for an initial strike. Both cities embody America. But these people want to see our entire nation fall.

 

[mr. cat]

Safety is a relative condition. You might get hit in a crosswalk, fall down a flight of stairs or suffer a heart attack. What I was attempting to point out to Vjoy is that those agencies charged with providing national security are now making maximum efforts to prevent further attacks by terrorists. That makes me feel safer, but obviously that feeling isn't shared by everyone.

=^..^=

 

[vjoy]

Deb

It is just that everyone has different reactions to what has happened. Grief and shock are manifested in many ways. I live in NYC. So my feelings may be different that people who live elsewhere, or they may not. I know fear is widespread throughout the country.

I just don't handle stress well, can you tell? ...aranoid2 aranoid2 Groan...

 

[Anne]

Please try not to worry too much about biological and chemical attacks. The main damage these would do is create panic in the public. This is something that can be prevented if people are educated about the risks - which are not that high - and about protection.

I doubt that an anthrax attack on a major city will cause more than a few dozens of fatalities (if caught on time). There are excellent antibiotics to fight anthrax and given on time, most people will be saved. I am not taking this threat lightly - it will mean evacuating a large area for several decades, but it's not as if the whole of the US will be destroyed or anything remotely like it. Smallpox is more scary, but it's really easy to get vaccinated against it. I am and so are most people in Israel. I find it hard to think of any chemical or biological attack that would cause even half the damage as the recent attack on NY.

You know, during the gulf war, the scuds themselves caused one casualty. Yet, about 20 people were killed because they forgot to take the lid off the filter in their gas mask. They were suffocating and thought it must have been a chemical attack so they never took the mask off and died. That was sheer panic that killed them. Keep your heads cool and don't be too alarmed. These threats can be handled and there not half as bad as the media makes them to be.

 

[catspride]

Look folks, Fear, to paraphrase, is always more terrifying than confronting the real thing. Likelier than global warfare (the frontal kind) and bacteriological, gas, or nuclear attacks are a bunch of rocks from the asteroid belts doing enough damage to strip us of most of our atmosphere. Disaster scenarios are imagined and considered to prepare governments for contingency plans. In Israel we have lived with the worry about bacteriological, gas, and nuclear threats ever since the Gulf War annoyed Saddam Hussein sufficiently to do more than arm his warheads with them. Fortunately, all of these things gradually decay in storage, and the nuclear warheads, made by Iraqis, become unstable and are likelier to blow up in their warehouses.

Which doesn't mean at any moment we won't have a suicidal strike by a human carrier.

More likely one day I will get on a city bus and get blown to kingdom come. Or walk into a shopping mall, or just on the sidewalk where I am an easy target to someone with a kalashnikov driving by on the road.

We can all sit around and dwell on these if we want to go crazy -- and we can dwell on them if we want the damned terrorists to win.

But to what avail? Our lives are, as they always have been, in God's hands. We don't close the chapter of our present book of life. God oversees that. We make as much of our fate as human will allows us, and then we accept what we cannot control.

TRUTH -- The US government, like all governments worldwide, I should imagine, are busy culturing sufficient anthrax (not to mention a lot of other bacteriological pathogens) to create a new range of vaccines, antidotes and curative drugs. In Israel, of course, we have had our plans for such events well in hand for years, and since the Gulf War, we have renewed our gasmask kits every year at government stations around the country.

TRUTH -- You in America are safer than you ever have been collectively, because bin Laden's wakeup call has stirred a hornet's nest of a vast range of protective and highly aggressive organizations. If there had been sky marshalls on the highjacked planes, it is very sure that most or all of them would not have been hijacked, or at worst, not reached their destinations. If there had been proper doors on the cockpits and cameras in the body of the plane for the pilots to monitor, do one could have forced the flimsy doors airplanes have one them. The government is going to take care of both these problems. Security is being tightened, and the way every citizen can help is by demanding that the government (your tax dollars, I am afraid) be allocated for whatever security it takes, and not bump it off on the airlines, who are not financially able to take up the bill. American Airlines didn't install on domestic flights even those few security measures that the FAA has been asking for because they were on the edge of bankruptcy every year and didn't really comprehend the dangers gathering in the world.

It shouldn't be a matter of money. I heard a politician from England yesterday state that they best way to avert ALL threats was to institute "El-Al" type measures (El-Al is Israel's national airline), and that that was unthinkable because it would require an enormous expenditure. But Israel pays for most of the security measures. It is part of securing the safety of its own citizens. The airline would, indeed, go bankrupt if the government didn't foot bills for security and for insurance payments in the event of a terrorist attack. Which is why I never fly internationally on any other carrier but El-Al.

TRUTH -- this atrocity took over 3 years to plan, including flight training for the hijackers, acquiring inside help through bribes, or by placing sympathizers in airport jobs YEARS AGO. And I am not talking about Arab-Americans here. Homegrown, tenth generation Americans even in the CIA and FBI have been known to take money for services rendered, and bin Laden's network is rolling in money. Trust the FBI to ferret them out while they are doing the enormous job of checking and rechecking all employees of airlines, airports, and all the businesses that flourish inside the airports, up to taxi companies that are likely to take someone to or from the airport, the dirvers of the airport busses-- It is a humongous job and it is going forward with very little fanfare.

Look, one learns to live with threat. but TRUTH, everyone in this world has been vulnerable to global threats since the first transatlantic jets made it only a few hours between continents. But now bin Laden has made the mistake of upping the ante. He has alerted all countries in the world to the potentials of his network of murderers, and an aroused world can do a very great deal to keep people safe. Dwell on the fact that life is to live, and that the souls of the dead are now within God's kingdom and can't be hurt anymore. And that being fearful and emphasizing the negative are almost an affront to their memory. If life is to stop because of fear, of what use was this terrible sacrifice of lives in New York?

Courage and pride lie in getting on with life. Psychologists and religious practitioners are all over the place to help with the nightmares and memories.

But be vigilant also. Life and living deserve your attention to ensure their preservation.

I am not one to say trust your government, because I have had a lifelong general distrust of governments and their intentions. But in this one thing, I assure you, from the most liberal democratic to the most despotic, all governments of the world (with the exception of those who are hand-in-glove with terrorists) are in perfect agreement about enforcing security regulations that are even now being internationally discussed and implemented. And if they don't want to enforce them, their airports will be cut off from international flights, and their airlines from landing anywhere but in their own countries.

I know your husband's (and because of his, yours) experiences were ghastly, and that they are impossible to forget. But it isn't forgetfulness you want to strive for -- forgetting means that you fall back into old and insecure patterns as a nation. You want to extract the pain from the memories (talk it out, cry, but hang tough) and hold on to the realization that you need to support your government in the measures it is trying to take.

Anyone who heard Clinton explain (after it all came out during this last week) that his government had been pursuing and attacking terrorists, with specific targetting of bin Laden's network Al Qaeda, throughout his two terms, but secretly. We didn't have the support of the key people in the country, he said. We couldn't go out and raise the necessary money, institute the necessary security measures, because the American public wouldn't stand for it. He called it not having the resources. And wasn't he right? If he had pushed the panic buttons 8 years ago, when he and the armed forces and the FAA started to quietly try to increase security all over the world in American institutions, wouldn't most of you, and myself included, have screamed about violations of civil liberties? Police states? Scare mongering? Wouldn't most of the western world have spoken of "Those Americans, always making nonsensical demands...always crying wolf..." and the Muslim countries outraged at America's "branding Muslins as the villains" because of the US alignment with, and support of, Israel? So the FAA suggested the new doors (indeed a company started manufacturing them in anticipation of a demand that most airlines did not make) and heightened security (which was also not fully complied with because of the high expense), special forces teams attacked certain meetings or locations globally from time to time, and the FBI and CIA began to amass intelligence information, which led them to began to investigate certain members of bin Laden's network who were known to be traveling to and from to the US.

That no one in their right mind would have imagined the attacks on New York and Washington -- how can we fault anyone? You have to be a monster to think of such a thing. but now, to coin a phrase we began using back in the Cold War years -- we must think the unthinkable and protect ourselves against it.

Find ways to rationalize your fear so that it does not immobilize you. Otherwise, bin Laden and his ilk will have achieved what they set out to do. Nothing in the world will be the same again, but we can all damned well make it better by going forward together and, along the way, getting rid of some vermin.

I pray for your peace of mind. I wish for us all safety and peace,

 

[catspride]

Dear Val -- I forgot to say the most important thing -- vent away. If you can't share your feelings with the good people here on this thread, where can you? We are all, in our different ways, trying to let go of the horror of last week. I still feel like crying when they show "ground zero." Or when they interview a survivor or a family member of someone "missing."

This is surely a time for people to lean on each other, to cry, to protest against the monstrous mind that planned this, and no doubt future attacks. So vent as long as you need to if it helps to come to terms with something so unspeakable that it is beyond comprehension.

Only don't be afraid, dear Val. Like Mr. Cat says -- there are so many ways to die accidentally, and we can't sit around worrying about them all the time. Otherwise, we would not be able to cope.

I pray for healing,

 

[airprincess]

Catherine,


thanks for making so much sense. I feel so much better after reading your post.

AP

 

[mr. cat]

Thank you both for your excellent words of encouragement and reality! Your posts are in essence "despatches from the front" and thus ring true. It is a great shame that such an awful tragedy as befell those many innocents two weeks ago now serves as a bond between cultures and nations, yet so it is; and I fondly hope our solidarity never fades with time.

=^..^=

 

[sfell]

Catherine,

I would like to second that! What an amazing talent you have, I just love reading your posts. If it weren't for your posts on this tragedy I think the news would be very confusing for me.

 

[vjoy]

Thank you Catherine and Anne, and all of you on this site.

I greatly appreciate your support, and part of the healing is to get feelings out, which is one of the reasons I posted what I did here.

Grieving and Trauma go through different stages, and I guess I will have to go through them in my own way.

We here in the US have of course known about attacks like this in other countries. When I hear of attacks in Israel, I cringe and am horrified. I think..."I could not live there, how can people live with that terror around the corner all the time??"

But now that it has come to The United States, we are caught offguard. We are faced with something new, something we thought would not happen to this extent: Terrorism on our shores. When it happens for the first time of such a magnatude, people don't know how to handle it. I know for a fact that there are people here who are now even afraid to leave their houses. Our collective concious is numb. Our collective concious is horrified. Our collective concious is grieving. But still, people are back now in lower Manhattan, and business goes on as usual.

My husband is there, although he is very, very fearful.

Even though I know security here is beefed up, to me it is still in its infancy, and it will take a while for my government to "get it right".

I thank you all again, and I know I have friends here.

I pray for you in Israel, as well as anywhere there is terrorism.