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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Remembering September 11th

9-11 seems so long ago, but yet I still remember the morning that it all happened. Lori Carson, someone who reported to me at the time, first told me that something was going on in New York City. Before long we had groups of people watching TV monitors throughout the building, all trying to figure out what happened.

I remember the videos...those scenes of the planes just ramming the towers, seeming just melding with the structures like a knife cutting into a cake.

I remember Sue Unvarsky from our office calling everyone together to try and disseminate some news on what was going on.

I remember going home early and picking up my kids from middle school. We just didn't know what was going on.

I remember shortly after it happened thinking to myself "I really should cry...the sheer horror of it should rightfully bring me to tears...the sights of people jumping out windows...the replay again and again of the video...all of it just should have made be break down into tears. I never did cry.

I remember the anger at it all. "F&^%ing nuke them all!" was uttered from my (and others) lips. That's the problem with anger though: it makes you do things in response that really don't provide any real satisfaction. In the case of 911, we lost far more lives in the "response" than we did in the attack.

I remember being in Newark a month or so later, looking out from an upper floor window of the Plaza building and seeing Manhattan in the distance, smoke still rising from the remains of the structures.

Most of all, I remember at that moment the world changed forever.

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