varn.dev

It’s wild to me how time passes, and that the 9/11 attacks took place 25 years ago. Though I didn’t know anyone involved, thankfully, in the attacks themselves, like every American alive at the time, it’s a day I won’t ever forget. The passage of time leaves just a few points in my mind but I felt it’s worth sharing since we all have our own experiences

I was working at a web development company in Tallahassee, FL at the time while going to college. I would normally work 30 hours a week and then squeeze classes in-between. On that day, I remember being at my desk, chatting with a friend on ICQ. We were both news junkies and would chat about the days headlines, and I distinctly remember seeing a Yahoo News brief post, probably from the AP, with a small blurb about “A plane appears to have crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center”. I don’t remember the exact wording but know it was short.

In another office, they had a TV up on the wall where they watched the news sometimes (I worked for a place that sold a product for lobbyists, so politics was sort of their thing) and I remember walking in and telling them that a plane had apparently hit the WTC. It was an interesting news story at the time, so we flipped on CNN. We watched for some info to get up to speed and were chatting amongst ourselves with it on in the background, when the 2nd plane hit. The room became stunned silence. That was the moment that we all realized it wasn’t an accident, but something deliberate. CNN and all news were scrambling to get up to date and of course not too long later is when the plane hit the Pentagon.

At that point, I was back at my desk and on the internet news sites. Even though we had a T1 line (woo, dedicated 1.5mbps speed!), the internet seemed…slow. Big sites like Yahoo, CNN, etc were taking a long moment to load, and it was often with broken images or styling. This seemed to be the first real test of what the internet could do - before CDNs, massive datacenter infrastructure, all of it, sites were on “fast” servers but it seemed like any larger site was under a DDOS attack, not from someone malicious but from the entirety of the world seeking information and news.

As the day progressed, the last plane crashing in Pennsylvania, the towers falling, all of it, the internet seemed to shift. CNN became a stark site of black and white and maybe one or two images, that was it. I can’t imagine the scrambling that was happening on the technical end, having to strip a site to it’s bones just to keep up with the traffic (remember most people were still on dial-up internet back then) and then keep up with the infrastructure to serve it. Everyone in the office was in a daze - businesses started closing, school was let out or cancelled. We had some sort of weird paranoia going on in the office that since Jeb Bush (George W’s brother) was governor of Florida so maybe we would be at risk too since he was in Tallahassee and our office was close so maybe we were at risk (silly to think in hindsight but of course, nothing about that day made sense) and we ended up closing too.

I remember after leaving work, talking to my family (my dad’s business was maybe 10 minutes away) and all of us just feeling a need to be close to the people we cared about. Even though I lived on my own, I remember I met up with my parents and brother at a Bennigan’s for dinner, just to be together and not really knowing what else to do. No one knew at the time what to do, and you can only watch so much news before becoming numb to everything. In times of crisis and upheaval, we seek those close to us.

Also at the time of the attacks, I maintained a personal site where I would blog once a day if I could - it gave me a chance to stretch my writing skills, but also jus have a space on the internet. I of course wrote about that day, and managed to find the old post on the Internet Archive.

Reading this back, 25 years later, is somewhat striking. Forgiving the flat out wrong speculation and, quite frankly, the uhh…melodramatic…tone of a lot of it, something that I wrote back then stuck out to me, writing as I was at the time with my emotions raw and my thoughts down to the base level of who I was

Americans are a hearty group, because we come from all over the globe and from every descent. We may fight and argue but our differences in a time like this bring us together. America means many things to each person, but we all see America as something worth defending.

I still believe that. We all of course know the terribleness that has been wrought by America since then - the wars waged under false pretenses, the increased surveillance state, the thousands and thousands of lives lost (on both sides) by us and those we attacked, and of course the last ~10 years of Trump - but I still think deep down that we are a good, if flawed people, and still care for my country.

I see now, with the passage of time and age the terrible things that we have done, but I still am proud to be here. My pride and what I find important may be far different than others, but I still believe in what I believe and still defend it. America is not perfect and it has it’s flaws. We should not have pride in the way we treated Muslims after 9/11 and the terrible wars we raged.

But as I said in that post, if you set that aside, you can still see the goodness and ideals and the core of what America really wants to be. Thinking back on 9/11, I still feel pride for being an American and appreciate those brief few weeks afterwards when we all actually did what politicians say to do - “set aside our differences” - briefly to be there for each other. People need people, especially in times of need and hurt and uncertainty.

So even though “Never forget” became the message shoved down our throat after 9/11, the thing that I will never forget is that we all CAN come together to support and help each other, if we really want to. It’s just sad that it takes a monumental tragedy like 9/11 to force us, and I hope we can find some way to support each other without all the death and bloodshed and pain. I know we can, we just have to try.