I still remember waking up for classes early that day in Phoenix. And on all the news stations was the footage of the first tower after it had been hit. All of the stations had been reporting that they had heard it was a plane. I remember being fascinated, just thinking it was pretty crazy that a plane flew into a building. Then I remember when I saw the second plane fly into the other tower, it was the first real "WTF!" moment I'd really experienced. Obviously it wasn't just some crazy accident anymore, I mean, TWO planes flew into skyscrapers in NYC on the same day. It was obviously some kind of attack.
I remember watching people jumping to their deaths; watching the camera tilt down, it seemed so far to fall. Like they were free falling forever, never going to hit the ground. How bad was it on their floors when jumping was a better alternative than trying to escape from within? I remember the "OMG" feeling I had after hearing about a plane crashing into the Pentagon. Feeling like the world was collapsing and everybody had gone crazy. How could people have gone so crazy that they would do this to other people?
When the towers collapsed, I really did feel vulnerable. Even being thousands of miles away, I felt scared. I remember the giant clouds of dust and debris engulfing the city. It wasn't anything like how falling skyscrapers looked in the movies, it was far worse. Much, much messier. Paper, ash and dust, all raining down.
I remember finding a link to an online forum where somebody had hinted on a huge attack on September 1, 2001, also 9/1/1. Reading the posts as he threatened people about an attack on America. Then after 9/1/1 came and went and nothing happened, everybody mocked him. Then once 9/11/01 happened, the forums went crazy. I never discovered if this was a true web forum or some crazy hoax.
I was only twenty at the time, the whole thing was a real eye opener. The Diamondbacks went to the world series that year and I remember being scared of another attack. Just waiting and wondering when the next attack would come. I can only imagine how scary it would have been if I had actually been a New Yorker. Needless to say, I've done a lot of growing up in the last ten years. Married, career and a house.
To anybody that lost a loved one, a colleague or a friend that day, my heart still goes out to you.
I generally find conspiracy theories to be entertaining, much the same way I find ghost stories, big foot stories and alien abduction stories to be fairly amusing. For some reason I just find the 9/11 conspiracy theories to be taboo.
If you want to blame the government for something, blame it for this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading
and this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png