9-11-06: This Blog Is "Dark" In Honor of the Victims

Nothing will be funny today. It's the fifth anniversary of the senseless slaughter of nearly 3,000 people.

All of the posts today are dedicated to the 2,996 people who lost their lives on 9-11.

Please consider this an open thread. Feel free to share the image or event from September 11, 2001 that made the biggest impression or had the most profound effect on you on.

Say whatever's on your mind.

Never forget. God bless America.

UPDATE: I wanted to publish more posts, but time didn't allow. I would like to have paid tribute to the first-responders who gave their lives trying to save others, the men and women of the military who have died fighting fighting to protect us, and those who are still putting their lives on the line every day.

 

Comments

[AnonymousDrivel]

"Let's roll."

Perhaps the most powerful, all-encompassing phrase I've ever heard. To elaborate further would be an injustice to it's diamond-tipped intent.

[Dodger]

I agree AD.

[Sierra Juliet]

I will laugh today. Not because those bastards succeeded in killing 3K of my fellow Americans, but in spite of it. I will laugh in earnest at my three year old son's impromptu antics and my daughter's rehearsed, stage-worthy routines. If my husband tells me a humorous anecdote from work, I will laugh at that as well. I will live the way I believe the fallen would want us all to live; Loving, laughing and embracing life with abandon. That is how I will honor and remember them.

[SteveB]

I lived in Spokane, Washington at the time, right beneath the busy air traffic corridor leading to SeaTac International in Seattle. I’ve always loved planes, and flying, and loved watching the big Jumbos winging their way westward, contrails in tow. For the longest time after 9/11, I could not look at those contrails without fear, without this dread that I would see one of those planes wing over and plummet to earth in the middle of downtown Spokane, or at the nearby Air Force base. For a while, I even stopped looking up, because it was easier to ignore them than to face the awful sense of impending destruction.

http://bitsofbrain.wordpress.com/2006/09/11/september-11th-2001-an-end-and-a-beginning/

[Amador]

Sept. 11, 2001 was the start, but the end will not come unless and until we free men force Islam into extinction. There can be no negotiation with them. They have proven that time and time again. We have waited for 5 years and there has yet to be a condemnation of the Islamofascists. And yet, Israel and America are verbally attacked every Friday in mosques around the world.
We either fight them to the last man now, or appease and let our children fight them to the last man. I'm still waiting for the rest of America to wake up.
While you send your children to school to learn to read and write, Muslims send their children to madrass to learn how to obey and never think and prepare to die for allah, and get sexually abused in the process.
Killing them all today would be fine by me.

[Gordon]

After seeing the second plane hit, I remember going back to my desk and just feeling numb.

The real dread was not so much the destruction of the towers themselves but rather not knowing what the scale of this attack was. The Towers, then the Pentagon. Would there be five, ten, hundreds?

An old high school friend and I had planned a motorcycle trip to Manhattan months before. So in October we went to Ground Zero. At the time you couldn't get within two blocks of the old towers. We peered in as far as we could through the fences.

The nearby buildings looked like they were covered in dust from disuse. Every firehouse in south Manhattan had flowers and memorials by the hundred.

Five years later and I still can't really articulate how I feel.

Thanks for the post, John.

[Skye]

God Bless America.

What more can be said?

[Rocketman]

Well done.
Necessary.
Thank you.

Never forget... never quit.

[darthlaurel]

I was supposed to fly out of San Francisco airport on the morning of the 11th. I was stuck in Santa Rosa for almost a week before my husband could drive out and pick me up to come back to Colorado and my 5 children.
The thing, the weird eery thing, I remember the most was how silent the skies were....no planes at all totally changed the ambient sounds in that part of California. It very quickly became absolutely creepy.
I'm not afraid of flying, and I have flown since, but it is hard to view muslims, in their native garb, with the same tolerance with which I was raised as an American, knowing that many of them have NO tolerance for us, even as they abuse our hospitality as a nation. Respect needs to go two ways.
Another ODD thing was seeing FLAGS flying in the streets of the People's Republic of Sabastopol, California. Apparently the boyscouts put them up around town. I don't think they lasted long, but no one touched the flags for the better part of that week, IIRC.