May We Remember...?

The other day was 9/11, so apologies for this slightly belated post. It was kind of interesting to see how the day is treated in the country that it happened in, because I mean, in NZ it's not really a big deal, It's sort of something that happened long ago and far away. Here that is not quite the case. September 11th has been officialy commerated as Patriot Day, and although there is no day off for it there are certain things that must be observed. Any flags flown from homes or goverment buildings must be flown at half mast and there is a moment of silence at some point during the day.

Also in psychology we watched a movie called '102 Minutes That Changed America' which was essentially pieced together footage from various sources that covered (funnily enough) 102 minutes starting just after the first plane hit the World Trade Centre. There was some unsettling stuff in that video that I'd never seen before, but the two that got me the most were shots of people jumping out of the buildings and falling ALL the way to the ground and the huge dust cloud.

When the first tower collapsed it sent this gigantic wave of pulverised concrete and debris flooding down the streets of Manhattan and you could see people running full tilt down the streets with it following them but tey would just be enveloped. Once particularly eerie sequence was some guy with a camera running down the street away from the cloud but it catches up with him and everything turns this horrible murky brown.

As far as respectfulness and honouring the day goes it's to varying degrees, my psychology teacher made a huge fuss out of it but I suppose that's fair enough. People at school though seem a little nonchalent about the whole thing but I can sort of understand why. They were all seven eight or nine when this happened and so it's a little hard to summon up the kind of horror that people who were older at the time must have felt when it occured, they remember, but only just. Some people said they didn't even know what the World Trade Centre was at the time (neither did I), a lot of the staff refer to it as 'your generation's Pearl Harbour' but it's not really, it's THEIR generations Pearl Harbour because they are the one's who are able to identify most strongly with the tradegy, most of them wouldn't have been alive (or if they were they would have been of a similar age; 7, 8, 9) at the time of Pearl Harbour (December 7th 1941 if anyone's wondering, but you could always ask Harry) so they would have been similar to people my age in regard to 9/11.

Also I thought it might be more of a big deal in Pennsylvania because of the hijacked plane that crashed in the field but I'm prety sure it never even got mentioned

Ok I'm done with that convoluted ramble, I hope you can undersand what I'm trying to get at. Also I know I obviously didn't take the pictures but I felt like I had to put SOMETHING up.

Lots of Love