Mehdi shares his memory of September 11, 2001, and how it changed his life and career, as Zeteo asks readers to share their own recollections of that fateful day – and how it changed their lives.
I was a young mother of 2 black boys on 9/11. I was getting ready for work when the news hit the airwaves. I remember the utter shock and disbelief. I remember the grotesque hope that it was some horrible, horrible accident followed by the dawning horror that it was something else entirely when the second plane hit. So much has changed in America, the world and our individual lives since then. On a small scale, I realized later that our family travel would never be the same. In the weeks before 9/11 my husband and I traveled across country, visiting family with an infant, a toddler, 2 car seats, a double stroller, a pop up play pen, diaper bags and suitcases - multiple states, multiple airports. All of which (minus the suitcases) we miraculously took right up to each and every airline gate, with little fanfare, as we crisscrossed the country. I can’t imagine doing that now! On a larger scale, I can’t help but wonder how different things would have gone with a President Gore in the WH. Maybe 9/11 would never had happened at all with a more competent person at the helm. The installment of the compromised SCOTUS preferred candidate, aided by the young lawyer John Roberts, was also horrific. How convenient to strategically stop the Florida vote count just when Bush was ahead, in order to hand deliver him the presidency. The full and final count (much later) revealed that Gore actually won Florida. And Bush gift wrapping the Chief SCOTUS job for Roberts, years later, was quite the thank you prize. It makes me sad and mad - the greed, corruption and power lust that has no problem with trampling over the will of the people on a regular basis. Then and now. And now that my 2 sweet boys are now black men living in this fake democracy that is hell bent to exalt white supremacy, no matter the damage, cost or ill/logic, I’m also fearful of what the future holds. But still we fight. But still we rise. We must.
I was in my second year of undergrad on 9/11. I was in class when the first plane hit, so I didn't know anything until I got out of class and heard from my parents. I can't say it changed my life though beyond reconfirming what I've known my entire life: the US is easily the most bigoted and racist place on the planet. 9/11 was the perfect excuse for ppl to show you exactly who they are, just as they're all doing now.
I was a Muslim female Ph.D. student at a prominent Canadian university. I was walking in the hallway when I reached an area with a TV. I watched in horror with one thing repeating in my mind, "let it not to be a Muslim". I knew what kind of hard times it will be for a Muslim if the attackers are Muslims.
I was on a privately chartered small plane from the FBO airport adjacent to Dulles airport on my way for a one day trip to Asheville, NC. All along the way I sat next to the pilot who explained how air traffic controllers work and changed as we covered distances. As we approached the Asheville airport the controller asked all planes to land at the nearest airport. The pilot, an airforce veteran said "here goes the government again with over reach!!." The minute we landed we were surrounded by security personnel, as we walked into the FBO we saw the first tower falling on TV. The pilot immediately booked a car to drive my colleague and me back to Virginia If we had waited there wouldn't have been rentals available. We drove back nonstop the next day. When we got back to WDC, there was no check, no IDs asked for at the terminal where we were parked. That is when I broke into a fever realizing that security was non existent.
My wife (now deceased) and I were heading to the dentist’s office for our checkup. The World Trade Center attack continued while we were there. I ended up coming home early from work that day (I am a university professor) because I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I was too worried about the horrible consequences that I feared would come.
You are not naval-gazing. That is a serious question. I am thankful that it changed you so that you could become an extremely well-informed news reporter and tell the truth about what is happening in the Middle East, particularly among Israel and other nations. On the suggestion of a Jewish friend who knows that I subscribe to your substack, I have also recently subscribed to the liberal Israeli newspaper, "Haaretz." It is fascinating to me how similar the views of the writers of "Haaretz" are to yours.
I am a psychiatrist and was seeing patients. In between patients, I remember my secretary looking up at me with a frightened look on her face, saying "a plane just hit one of the Twin Towers." I wondered why she was so shaken, and said, "What a shame," and walked with my patient into my office. When we came out, my next patient was a woman, an artist, who grew up in the Bronx. She looked stunned. She said, "All of my uncles and cousins are firemen in NYC." That's when I found out what had happened. Barbara and Brenda and I all sat there, listening to the news. Barbara looked increasingly terrified. The phone rang. My daughter's elementary school was calling all of the parents to come pick up their children. I drove to her school. She was 6 and had just started first grade. She was there waiting for me. As we walked to the car, she put her little hand in mine, looked up at me and said, "A plane hit a big building." I said, "I know. That's so sad. It was a bad accident." And that was that. We went home. My husband was glued to the TV set, as he remained for the following 24 hours. I told him to lock the living room door, and my daughter and I went to a different part of the house and read books, played a game, went out on a walk. She was too young to know what had happened, and it was my job to protect her.
I was working on the 28th floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago…you constantly see the plans going in and out of O’Hare. I worked for a bank and the traders room behind us had a bunch of TVs mounted for stock info, and they were all images of the towers after the first plane hit. We watched live as the second plane hit, and then the building alarm went off and announced we were to evacuate immediately. It was so shocking I just went into autopilot and got on the elevator (not the best idea but worked out), and then spent the rest of my time on the way back on the train trying to call a friend in NY with no luck, and fielding calls from family. Terrible.
I was in the basement of NYU taking Persan lessons when we were evacuated. I had just married less than a year to a man who was born in Iran. My first thoughts were let's hope it wasn't the Iranians. (In fact the people of Iran displayed great solidarity and sympathy for New Yorkers on that day.) It is particularly offensive to me that some people are implying that Mayor Mamdani should not attend the ceremony and this question is plastered on the news as if it was a normal thing to say.
I’m from Iran and now, 40 years a US citizen. I had several work crews working at our house finishing up a big renovation project. They stopped what they were doing and we all squeezed into one room, paralyzed in front of the TV. It was a microcosm of America: Polish painters, Italian carpenters, Mexican landscapers and Portuguese masons, in an Iranian American home. An incredible day of solidarity. I was in NJ, aged 41 then and ended up being the mom who picked up mine and other people’s kids from several schools to get them to a safe home. My husband was on a train into Manhattan when the first plane hit. He ended up grabbing a hotel room asap and stayed the night. It took days for many people to get home to the suburbs. We knew two people who died in the towers.
I'd just finished undergrad, so I assume we're the same age. I heard a plane had hit the first tower over the radio, we all assumed it was a Cessna or a G5. A bit later, I was in my bosses office; he had a TV, that's when the second plane hit. I remember that entire day how hard it was to get CNN up and running over the Internet, presumably because of the web traffic demand. Also, I was working for the government at the time, so in the months ahead, we had so many additional layers of security added to our mornings.
I was on a treadmill at the gym in Toronto watching the TV's when they started showing the aftermath of the first plane and watched live the second plane crashing. The moment the second incident happened I automatically suspected it was a deliberate attack.
How it changed my life? As a Lebanese Colombian with a very common Arab name.. the profiling went from possible drugdealer to possible terrorist. So a little more scrutiny when going through customs after they read my name on the passport, especially if I had traveled to the middle east.
I was sitting in my dentist's chair on the Upper East Side of Manhattan listening to classical music on WQXR to distract me when the announcer said that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We continued with the appointment. On the subway to work afterwards, I met an acquaintance who said that a second plane had crashed into the other WTC building. When I got to work in midtown Manhattan everyone on the floor was trying to find a TV to watch or was looking out the window at the smoke (although we were on the 30th floor, the WTC towers were hidden from view by other buildings). We watched as the towers went down. The firm canceled work for the day and, as the subways and trains were not working, everyone had to walk home -- a coworker of mine had to walk from our office to his home in Long Island.
As the towers were burning, but before they collapsed, I called a friend of mine who worked in a neighboring building to the towers and lived near them. He had been walking to work when the first crash occurred, and immediately went back home. While I was on the phone with him, he was reporting on how he was seeing people jumping or falling down from the burning towers.
A neighbor of mine worked in the WTC, but was not there at the time because he was taking his child to her first day of kindergarten. Another neighbor, a professional photographer, immediately drove down to the WTC to take photos. As he was taking his photos the first tower collapsed, spewing toxic dust for blocks. My neighbor ran at full speed to escape the dust, eventually crawling under a car to protect himself. He still suffers from PTSD from the episode.
At the time I lived in Brooklyn Heights and had a wonderful view of downtown Manhattan from my windows. For weeks after the attack I could smell the site, which sent smoke in the air for a significant time afterward (at least, in my memory).
On 9/11, all of the local hospitals prepared for incoming wounded from the towers. Only when reports started coming in that the emergency rooms were empty did we got a sense of the human devastation from the attacks -- virtually no one who was there survived.
Because there were so few human remains from the collapse, for months after 9/11 fences around NYC were plastered with flyers containing photos of missing persons. I typically walked past St. Patrick's Cathedral on my way to work, and several times a week after 9/11 there were funeral masses there commemorating NYPD and NYFD personnel lost in the collapse.
The backlash against the Muslim community after 9/11 was, I believe, significantly underreported in the major newspapers. To my recollection, only The Village Voice contained detailed on-the-ground reporting of what was happening in Muslim communities around the country and, especially, NYC.
I was on my way to work that morning-at a Pre-K school in San Jose,California.I had the radio on. I remember stopping at the side of the very winding road to work and calling my husband-telling him to turn on the news...what was happening was unbelievable yet believable at the same time. I then went in to one of the most difficult working days I ever had. I had to face 20, 4 year olds who wondered why the "giants" were so upset. I realized immediately that my first responsibility was to hold it together for them. Children expect the teachers to be a rockbed of stability. We worked out the rest of that week and year with the trauma induced by being allowed to watch the horrific clips over and over on the T.V. Parents were in shock, they weren't thinking to a 4 year old it wasn't one incident but everytime the reels were shown, they thought it was a new incident. The rest of that year, American flags were dominant in their art. I still have one of these flags that I cherish. Those children are now entering their 30's. I wonder how much they remember. How it affected me is that I became more inclusive of children of all backgrounds in our school, and until I retired was a strong advocate of the importance of honoring diversity in my classroom.
I remember I had the morning off from work, and as I watched it on TV, I thought it was a terrible accident that a commercial airliner would crash into a building. But then a second airliner crashed into the other tower, and I knew it was no accident. "This is war; this is Pearl Harbor", I thought to myself. I also remember being surprised to find that they learned so quickly that Osama bin-Laden was responsible. Only later would I learn that the White House had been warned of an impending attack of this kind and ignored it.
I was in my 50s and had not heard the news (I had already quit TV) when I got a phone call from my sister. She told me already that she feared the consequences, that the Bush administration was going to use it to cause more ruin here and around the world. It changed all our lives.
I was watching from up the street in SoHo when the second plane hit the south tower. I suppose it did change my life, in that it prolonged my time at TIME magazine by a decade -- I'd have been laid off as surplus to requirements based on where the magazine was going in mid-2001, but as someone who had written quite a bit about Al Qaeda before 9/11 and new a thing or two about the context, I guess my prospects changed... Full story is here https://tonykaron.substack.com/p/did-bin-laden-save-my-job
I was a young mother of 2 black boys on 9/11. I was getting ready for work when the news hit the airwaves. I remember the utter shock and disbelief. I remember the grotesque hope that it was some horrible, horrible accident followed by the dawning horror that it was something else entirely when the second plane hit. So much has changed in America, the world and our individual lives since then. On a small scale, I realized later that our family travel would never be the same. In the weeks before 9/11 my husband and I traveled across country, visiting family with an infant, a toddler, 2 car seats, a double stroller, a pop up play pen, diaper bags and suitcases - multiple states, multiple airports. All of which (minus the suitcases) we miraculously took right up to each and every airline gate, with little fanfare, as we crisscrossed the country. I can’t imagine doing that now! On a larger scale, I can’t help but wonder how different things would have gone with a President Gore in the WH. Maybe 9/11 would never had happened at all with a more competent person at the helm. The installment of the compromised SCOTUS preferred candidate, aided by the young lawyer John Roberts, was also horrific. How convenient to strategically stop the Florida vote count just when Bush was ahead, in order to hand deliver him the presidency. The full and final count (much later) revealed that Gore actually won Florida. And Bush gift wrapping the Chief SCOTUS job for Roberts, years later, was quite the thank you prize. It makes me sad and mad - the greed, corruption and power lust that has no problem with trampling over the will of the people on a regular basis. Then and now. And now that my 2 sweet boys are now black men living in this fake democracy that is hell bent to exalt white supremacy, no matter the damage, cost or ill/logic, I’m also fearful of what the future holds. But still we fight. But still we rise. We must.
I was in my second year of undergrad on 9/11. I was in class when the first plane hit, so I didn't know anything until I got out of class and heard from my parents. I can't say it changed my life though beyond reconfirming what I've known my entire life: the US is easily the most bigoted and racist place on the planet. 9/11 was the perfect excuse for ppl to show you exactly who they are, just as they're all doing now.
I was a Muslim female Ph.D. student at a prominent Canadian university. I was walking in the hallway when I reached an area with a TV. I watched in horror with one thing repeating in my mind, "let it not to be a Muslim". I knew what kind of hard times it will be for a Muslim if the attackers are Muslims.
I was on a privately chartered small plane from the FBO airport adjacent to Dulles airport on my way for a one day trip to Asheville, NC. All along the way I sat next to the pilot who explained how air traffic controllers work and changed as we covered distances. As we approached the Asheville airport the controller asked all planes to land at the nearest airport. The pilot, an airforce veteran said "here goes the government again with over reach!!." The minute we landed we were surrounded by security personnel, as we walked into the FBO we saw the first tower falling on TV. The pilot immediately booked a car to drive my colleague and me back to Virginia If we had waited there wouldn't have been rentals available. We drove back nonstop the next day. When we got back to WDC, there was no check, no IDs asked for at the terminal where we were parked. That is when I broke into a fever realizing that security was non existent.
My wife (now deceased) and I were heading to the dentist’s office for our checkup. The World Trade Center attack continued while we were there. I ended up coming home early from work that day (I am a university professor) because I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I was too worried about the horrible consequences that I feared would come.
You are not naval-gazing. That is a serious question. I am thankful that it changed you so that you could become an extremely well-informed news reporter and tell the truth about what is happening in the Middle East, particularly among Israel and other nations. On the suggestion of a Jewish friend who knows that I subscribe to your substack, I have also recently subscribed to the liberal Israeli newspaper, "Haaretz." It is fascinating to me how similar the views of the writers of "Haaretz" are to yours.
I am a psychiatrist and was seeing patients. In between patients, I remember my secretary looking up at me with a frightened look on her face, saying "a plane just hit one of the Twin Towers." I wondered why she was so shaken, and said, "What a shame," and walked with my patient into my office. When we came out, my next patient was a woman, an artist, who grew up in the Bronx. She looked stunned. She said, "All of my uncles and cousins are firemen in NYC." That's when I found out what had happened. Barbara and Brenda and I all sat there, listening to the news. Barbara looked increasingly terrified. The phone rang. My daughter's elementary school was calling all of the parents to come pick up their children. I drove to her school. She was 6 and had just started first grade. She was there waiting for me. As we walked to the car, she put her little hand in mine, looked up at me and said, "A plane hit a big building." I said, "I know. That's so sad. It was a bad accident." And that was that. We went home. My husband was glued to the TV set, as he remained for the following 24 hours. I told him to lock the living room door, and my daughter and I went to a different part of the house and read books, played a game, went out on a walk. She was too young to know what had happened, and it was my job to protect her.
I was working on the 28th floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago…you constantly see the plans going in and out of O’Hare. I worked for a bank and the traders room behind us had a bunch of TVs mounted for stock info, and they were all images of the towers after the first plane hit. We watched live as the second plane hit, and then the building alarm went off and announced we were to evacuate immediately. It was so shocking I just went into autopilot and got on the elevator (not the best idea but worked out), and then spent the rest of my time on the way back on the train trying to call a friend in NY with no luck, and fielding calls from family. Terrible.
I was in the basement of NYU taking Persan lessons when we were evacuated. I had just married less than a year to a man who was born in Iran. My first thoughts were let's hope it wasn't the Iranians. (In fact the people of Iran displayed great solidarity and sympathy for New Yorkers on that day.) It is particularly offensive to me that some people are implying that Mayor Mamdani should not attend the ceremony and this question is plastered on the news as if it was a normal thing to say.
I’m from Iran and now, 40 years a US citizen. I had several work crews working at our house finishing up a big renovation project. They stopped what they were doing and we all squeezed into one room, paralyzed in front of the TV. It was a microcosm of America: Polish painters, Italian carpenters, Mexican landscapers and Portuguese masons, in an Iranian American home. An incredible day of solidarity. I was in NJ, aged 41 then and ended up being the mom who picked up mine and other people’s kids from several schools to get them to a safe home. My husband was on a train into Manhattan when the first plane hit. He ended up grabbing a hotel room asap and stayed the night. It took days for many people to get home to the suburbs. We knew two people who died in the towers.
I'd just finished undergrad, so I assume we're the same age. I heard a plane had hit the first tower over the radio, we all assumed it was a Cessna or a G5. A bit later, I was in my bosses office; he had a TV, that's when the second plane hit. I remember that entire day how hard it was to get CNN up and running over the Internet, presumably because of the web traffic demand. Also, I was working for the government at the time, so in the months ahead, we had so many additional layers of security added to our mornings.
I was on a treadmill at the gym in Toronto watching the TV's when they started showing the aftermath of the first plane and watched live the second plane crashing. The moment the second incident happened I automatically suspected it was a deliberate attack.
How it changed my life? As a Lebanese Colombian with a very common Arab name.. the profiling went from possible drugdealer to possible terrorist. So a little more scrutiny when going through customs after they read my name on the passport, especially if I had traveled to the middle east.
I was sitting in my dentist's chair on the Upper East Side of Manhattan listening to classical music on WQXR to distract me when the announcer said that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We continued with the appointment. On the subway to work afterwards, I met an acquaintance who said that a second plane had crashed into the other WTC building. When I got to work in midtown Manhattan everyone on the floor was trying to find a TV to watch or was looking out the window at the smoke (although we were on the 30th floor, the WTC towers were hidden from view by other buildings). We watched as the towers went down. The firm canceled work for the day and, as the subways and trains were not working, everyone had to walk home -- a coworker of mine had to walk from our office to his home in Long Island.
As the towers were burning, but before they collapsed, I called a friend of mine who worked in a neighboring building to the towers and lived near them. He had been walking to work when the first crash occurred, and immediately went back home. While I was on the phone with him, he was reporting on how he was seeing people jumping or falling down from the burning towers.
A neighbor of mine worked in the WTC, but was not there at the time because he was taking his child to her first day of kindergarten. Another neighbor, a professional photographer, immediately drove down to the WTC to take photos. As he was taking his photos the first tower collapsed, spewing toxic dust for blocks. My neighbor ran at full speed to escape the dust, eventually crawling under a car to protect himself. He still suffers from PTSD from the episode.
At the time I lived in Brooklyn Heights and had a wonderful view of downtown Manhattan from my windows. For weeks after the attack I could smell the site, which sent smoke in the air for a significant time afterward (at least, in my memory).
On 9/11, all of the local hospitals prepared for incoming wounded from the towers. Only when reports started coming in that the emergency rooms were empty did we got a sense of the human devastation from the attacks -- virtually no one who was there survived.
Because there were so few human remains from the collapse, for months after 9/11 fences around NYC were plastered with flyers containing photos of missing persons. I typically walked past St. Patrick's Cathedral on my way to work, and several times a week after 9/11 there were funeral masses there commemorating NYPD and NYFD personnel lost in the collapse.
The backlash against the Muslim community after 9/11 was, I believe, significantly underreported in the major newspapers. To my recollection, only The Village Voice contained detailed on-the-ground reporting of what was happening in Muslim communities around the country and, especially, NYC.
I was on my way to work that morning-at a Pre-K school in San Jose,California.I had the radio on. I remember stopping at the side of the very winding road to work and calling my husband-telling him to turn on the news...what was happening was unbelievable yet believable at the same time. I then went in to one of the most difficult working days I ever had. I had to face 20, 4 year olds who wondered why the "giants" were so upset. I realized immediately that my first responsibility was to hold it together for them. Children expect the teachers to be a rockbed of stability. We worked out the rest of that week and year with the trauma induced by being allowed to watch the horrific clips over and over on the T.V. Parents were in shock, they weren't thinking to a 4 year old it wasn't one incident but everytime the reels were shown, they thought it was a new incident. The rest of that year, American flags were dominant in their art. I still have one of these flags that I cherish. Those children are now entering their 30's. I wonder how much they remember. How it affected me is that I became more inclusive of children of all backgrounds in our school, and until I retired was a strong advocate of the importance of honoring diversity in my classroom.
I remember I had the morning off from work, and as I watched it on TV, I thought it was a terrible accident that a commercial airliner would crash into a building. But then a second airliner crashed into the other tower, and I knew it was no accident. "This is war; this is Pearl Harbor", I thought to myself. I also remember being surprised to find that they learned so quickly that Osama bin-Laden was responsible. Only later would I learn that the White House had been warned of an impending attack of this kind and ignored it.
I was in my 50s and had not heard the news (I had already quit TV) when I got a phone call from my sister. She told me already that she feared the consequences, that the Bush administration was going to use it to cause more ruin here and around the world. It changed all our lives.
I was watching from up the street in SoHo when the second plane hit the south tower. I suppose it did change my life, in that it prolonged my time at TIME magazine by a decade -- I'd have been laid off as surplus to requirements based on where the magazine was going in mid-2001, but as someone who had written quite a bit about Al Qaeda before 9/11 and new a thing or two about the context, I guess my prospects changed... Full story is here https://tonykaron.substack.com/p/did-bin-laden-save-my-job