[scandium]

I had just gotten home from my first class of the semester, a 4th year sociology seminar on Globalization that had started at 9:30 but ended early, as most first classes of the semester do, and I remember - ironically - that I happened to be wearing a t-shirt with "Challenge Authority" on the front of it along with the Anarchist symbol (a souvenier from a trip to Berkley earlier that year). My phone rang and it was a friend of mine whose first words out of his mouth were "they're bombing NYC". I had no idea what he was talking about, who "they" were (since the US wasn't at war with anyone) and thought he was pulling my leg.

He was so persistent that I gave up and turned on the TV. As I am in a timezone farther east than NYC it must have only been around 9:30 AM there by that point; both towers were on fire but had not yet collapsed. The anchors were trying to puzzle out what was happening while continually rerunning the footage of the 2nd airliner striking one of the towers, and I watched both collapse live on CNN.

I skipped my other class I had that day, and spent the rest of the day glued to the TV the same as I suspect most others had. My gut reaction when flight 93 went down was that it was shot down.

If someone had told me that day that the whole thing had been masterminded by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan I would have thought them mental. I still don't know what to make of the whole thing, but reject any high level conspiracy theories because something of that magnitude could not be kept quiet for so long. Yet I remain skeptical of the official version of events, though there are no alternative versions that I've been sold on; yet the enormity of the intelligence and security failures involved, the slow and inept response, all combine to make me wonder just how so many people could have screwed up so spectacularly. And I really don't understand how Bush, whose watch this catastrophe occured on, managed to emerge as the hero figure that he did. Though I'll grant that he gave a very moving and stellar speech on the ruins of the WTC a few days later - the highpoint of his presidency.