At the time I was 20 (nearly 21), and working at my local high school as a teaching assistant. I got home earlier than normal, I really must’ve bezzed it home in the car, as I was home at about 3:20pm. I got in, and my mum said that there was something on the radio about an explosion in New York, asked if I could stick Sky News on and see what was going on. I did so, in time to see the North Tower come crashing down “live” on television (probably a two minute delay in newsfeed, but it was as live as I was gonna get over here).

I then spent the next two hours on the edge of the couch, fiddling absently with the remote and watching the disjointed news reports, flicking through channels. At this point, information was still being made available, so we didn’t know about the Pentagon or UA93 coming down until a little while later.

It was quite a scary thought, I must admit. Although we could all view the events with a detached calm, it still unsettled us that someone could take a pop (and such a big pop, at that) at the good old USofA.

I grew up in Coventry (look it up, good city, lotta history, some of it not all good, especially the WWII bit) during the Troubles. I can remember the Warrington and Bishopsgate bombings in ’93, and then the Docklands and Manchester bombings in ’96. Manchester was really the last bombing by the PIRA on Mainland UK, followed only by Omagh in ’98. (The Real IRA took up the bombings and attacks in Ireland while the PIRA were decommissioning). I can remember having fire drills at school one week, and then bomb evacuation drills the next week. Kinda surreal. You knew the long, continuous ringing was a fire drill, good excuse to piss about. But if that bell rang in a pattern: five short rings, pause, five short rings, pause… That was enough to instill fear in you. That was panic. That was *real*, and that drill always went in silence. Because you never knew if it was the real thing or not. You didn’t wanna risk it.

But through all the Troubles, you knew who the enemy were. You distrusted anybody with an Irish accent who looked kinda shifty. But this, on 9/11, this was something different. This was the great America being attacked by terrorists, and this wasn’t the IRA with a few car bombs. This was planes, FFS, and this was something else.

Since then, and then with with the 7/7 bombings in London, the face of the enemy changed. The Irish accent turned to a different language. The black and ginger hair became dark skin and asian features. And what was really scary, was the fact that whereas in the Troubles, we were the only target, since 9/11, the target was half the world. Nowhere was safe anymore.

The world changed that day. I think the world is still in upheaval, and will be for a great many decades to come.

My thoughts, just rambling on from a different perspective.

Peace and love,
TA7
.-= Andy Walker´s last blog ..Days of silence =-.