On Sept. 11, 2001 when the airplanes flew into the twin towers I was in Glasgow, Scotland getting ready to sound check for the first show of a month long European tour with Guttermouth. Guttermouth never made it because they were supposed to fly out on the 11th. We flew out of Newark on Sept. 10 around 8am, about 24 hours before one of the planes "supposedly" left Newark heading for the twin towers.
I watched the second plane impact into the building in real time as a lot of you might have. It was so surreal..I had only been standing in front of the tv for about three minutes in the promoter's office. She had just turned the tv on about five minutes before I got in there and wasn't really watching it. I was watching the smoke from the other tower and trying to figure out what the announcer was saying when I saw the second one hit. I could hear our soundman, Jordan from the next room,
" Bro, I can't get through to my girlfriend in New York..something is going on." (I don't know if he said Bro, but he use to say Bro a lot. Hey Jordan, if you are out there!)
It took about a half an hour or so for the band and the club people to congregate and start to realize the impact of what was going on. Everybody was trying the phones..and were in various forms of nervousness/panic. We all talked each other down throughout the afternoon and did our best to bring a good time at the show but nobody could shake their concerns and really cut loose.
I don't know exactly why I am writing about this.. I guess I would like to pay my own respects to the event and the awakenings it brought about. It sure woke me up like it did many people. I had never experienced war or terrorism that close to home in my life. I experienced bomb threats in England but, that was England. This was twenty-five minutes from where I grew up, where my family was from. My cousin watched bodies flying out of the building from the street as she was running to safety. In other words war on tv is not real at all, it just looks like a movie. We are pretty conditioned and de-sensitized to it. The whole televised version of the Iraq war almost looks cool! I mean they photograph it with amazing cinematography and they all have their super kick ass terminator soldier gear. I can see how they can easily sucker in some good hearted and vulnerable kids. I have met some of them who joined right after Sept. 11 and really had a hard time once they started to see the lie of it all. But that's our lesson to learn, right. So…."We Don't Get Fooled Again!!" Like "the Who' song says.
So in the spirit of searching for the truth I want to try to document my thoughts on the subject of Sept. 11th as best I can. As an un-proffessionally educated observer I will lay it out there.
First of all its hard for me to accept the story that FEMA gives about how the towers went down. There are a lot of documentaries on the subject and I watched the "official" one and it kept grating on my common sense. If you are really interested in seeing some of them I'm sure you know how to find them. I don't have my details surrounding the whole event straight enough to list them totally accurately, but it seems so outrageously obvious that those towers were demolished with explosives from the inside. There are so so many holes in the story of what happened. Bush and Cheney would not speak about it separately and they interviewed together on the subject in the same room and barely said anything. If you think our own government couldn't have been responsible for that… well, you are like me. I had a hard time swallowing it…but I not only think its possible our current administration was responsible I believe it in my heart. That doesn't mean I can prove it but all the details I have seen kept pointing me to that conclusion.
In the bigger picture this event has been a positive wake-up call for myself and lots of people around the world but in America especially. We could pass from this life at any time so it is a great reminder to me to live like today is my last day on earth.
Love
Greg
2 comments:
I'm feeling really weird commenting here because no one else seems to be. But since I am trying to break free of one my many irrational fears (commenting on the blogs of people I don't personally know well - I wonder what the technical term for that is, blogophobia?) I shall do so anyway.
I was actually in college, in class, when each plane hit. We could see the smoke from the first plane out the window. At first we thought it was just an accident and my teacher (who later regretted saying this) said "accidents happen all the time, let's focus on the lesson." (the class was on Modern Revolutions)
When the second plane hit, our school was evacuated and everyone, EVERYONE, was in the street with eyes fixed downtown at the smoke slowly oozing across the sky. I still remember a woman, a stranger to me, scream "the towers fell. THEY FELL." and I went up to her and grabbed her and asked her if that was true. She said it was.
All I could think about were all the innocent people inside the building or walking by that were probably killed just then. All I could do was scream and cry and bang my head against a mailbox. Usually I am very aware of controlling how much emotion I show in public but that was one of the few times I didn't care who saw me.
I still remember the sound of the jets flying overhead after I biked home. It felt like war.
Little did I know, my future husband was a few blocks away from the towers when they fell. I count my blessings today, thinking of how lucky I am that he was not any closer than he was, and that he was able to get away without a scratch, and without any health complications from breathing in all that crap (he lived down there at the time). Many people were not so lucky.
I was just entering 3rd period (government class lol) when I saw my teacher crying and wheeled in the T.V. and put the news on and all period we watched and I saw the second plane hit and I truly didnt know what to think. the next four classes were spent in the library and people were crying.
They had the nerve to make a new rule the next day that during school we are not to know about whats going on in the news. I just thought that was so ridiculous.
Thanks for sharing your story greg, and I always look forward to your new posts.
-Lissa
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