What is there left to say about September 11, 2001? Maybe all should be silence. RIP: all the people who died that day and in the wars that followed.
Where was I when I heard the news? Well, I was at work, because 9 AM in New York equals 3 PM in the Netherlands. I vividly remember a colleague coming into my office to tell me the news and me laughing in his face in disbelief. Planes flying into buildings? It just couldn't be true, could it? But it was. And the world changed.
Strangely enough my first thoughts of compassion were for those people on the planes, knowing they were being made into a living, dying bomb. No way out. Some of the people in the Towers had a small chance of getting out, they had none.
Then I thought of all the ordinary people working in or near the Twin Towers, going to work today that fateful day with no idea of how terrible a day it was going to be. Acts of terrorism and war destroy the lives of the innocents first and foremost.
CNN.com was down, internet news sites all over the world were down, everyone scrambling to get news updates. In a moment of inspiration I turned to eBay.com, their messageboards were still functioning. It was unreal, reading about death, destruction and terrorism on the site I had used so much over the years for the innocent pleasure of adding stuff to my various collections. In an seemingly endless thread, post after post told of grief, terror and pain.
Then, and I will never forget this, I saw these words in caps: SECOND TOWER DOWN. More powerful than any image these 3 words for me sum up the horror of September 11, 2001.
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