Your 9/11 memories

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I remember watching my mom watch smoke pouring out of the towers on tv, but I didn't really understand it then (I was almost 5) and was probably not allowed to watch once I was noticed... When it's mentioned I don't really feel emotion and usually the first thing that comes to mind is the restrictions on freedom that followed it.

I quote from my self it post from thread about history of internet.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp5822199 ... t=#5822199

I'm from Poland, in my country internet become available much later than in west. I remember 1999 as i begged my dad to give my 4 pln a dollar more or less, for Internet Caffe, which was recently opened. I already spend my allowance. And i desperately want to surf the web for fist time in my life
I was 13 back than. I remember one day in 2001 i have my allowance and go with my dad on shooing later i go to Internet Caffe, i went there with my dad, he ask me to search on the internet something for him. But this day Internet was terribly lagging. I knew that Polish Internet Land line was much slower than in the west everything loading extremely slow, my dad suggest that i should go to the owner and demand money return . I renumber than on "Wirtualna Polska - Virtual Poland" on of biggest Polish Internet Poland posted new "Atak terrorystyczny na USA - Samolot Uderzył w gmach World Trade Center - Terrorist Attack on USA: Plane hinted World Trade Center Building" My dad said using little crude language that is sick stupid and tasteless joke and insisted me to search on internet about what he asked me.

I think if I was looking for information about diseases of the heart, because my poor dad suffered from heart disease. Sadly, he died in 2002

As I returned home with my dad it turned out that it was not a sick joke, but the truest truth. All Polish and foreign TV stations talked about a terrorist attack on America, it was a memorable 11 September 2001, I hence knew why the Internet work so slowly on that day.

Since 2005, I have high speed internet, at a very affordable price, because municipal heating plant, laying a new heating pipes, laid a fiber optic cable.
By creating a Wroclaw Municipal Internet Network, from what I know it was probably subsidized by the European Union, because Poland joined the EU in 2004

Regretablly it turned me into an overpatriotic t***, but eventually I learned not to trust the system so much.

I was editor of a conspiracy theory website back then. Given that ten years have passed since the collapse of the USSR, and the U.S. had a decade of near uninterrupted growth, I never expected my readership to grow beyond a few crazies. The big issues of the day, as I had on my website, were OPEC hiding the fact that global peak oil was near, how the CIA forced a US Air Force aircraft to land in China, and a debate over whether Alan Greenspan or the WTO really controlled the world. Based on feedback and limited marketing research I had, most of my readers were young, unemployed or underemployed men. I could feed them any cockamanie conspiracy theory I put out there, because these kids needed to cling to a belief.

9/11 was a game changer for me. Here was a society, so victorious in many wars, that they could not concieve of even the slightest defeat. Here was a society, protected by two oceans and friendly neighbors, that had not seen an attack by a foreign power on its mainland since 1815. Here was a society so conceited, so smug, so innocent that they truly believed no harm could come to them, like kids drag racing. The events of 9/11 boggled the mind of every American, especially understimulated youths.

Here was a piece of conspiracy theory gold. I could tell my readers anything they wanted to hear. It was the Mossad, who fired missiles to make the U.S. a vassal state of Israel's! It was Wall Street, hoping to profit from a meltdown in the financial system. It was the IRS, working with Saddam Hussein! It was Satan! I could tell them anything, and it would make more sense than the truth: that it was a random act of terror by a few politically motivated extremists that wanted attention.

An old girlfriend had arrived back in Dallas on September 10, so the morning of the 11th still remains frozen in my memory. I woke up to find her crying in front of the TV, assuming she was watching a sad movie. Once I learned the attacks were real, I remained stunned for about 30 minutes...then said, "OK, when we gonna go kill 'em?" I had zero empathy for the terrorists, and I'm still shocked it took us over a decade to kill Osama bin Laden. We should've taken him and Saddam Hussein both out on principle after that.