Where were you...

during the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington? Dredging up the past maybe, but I was watching a different perspective of the attacks last night, on Reality TV, which showed the views of professional videographers and not the media networks...way different from each other. These guys had hard-hitting reality, not just the images of airplanes crashing into the towers, or the towers coming down, but images of people's reactions, from all angles (not just elevated views) and interactions with people on the ground. There was even footage of New York in the week following the event. While the attacks were happening, instead of getting the hell out of the way, people were standing around taking photos with their fancy camera-phones as the second airplane plowed into the tower. Some people were even walking toward the towers to try and get a better view or photo. One woman, a professional videographer, was manhandled into a shop by the owner literally seconds before the fallout from the first tower passed. As he pulled her in, she was ranting "What do you think you're doing?" She did, however, have the presence to put the camera down on the counter, facing out of the shop window. Seconds later, a black cloud of smoke, dust and all sorts of shit came billowing past. If she'd been out there, she would have been dead, choked. As it happens, she was alive and ran around for a full five minutes shouting "You saved my life, oh my God, you save my life, thank you, thank you" to the shop owner. Stupid cow... In the days following the collapse of the towers, it was amazing to see the different attitudes coming out, everything from hatred toward other nations and religions, to fear of other Americans. A guy and a girl, unknown to each other when they started ranting and raving at each other, were part of seperate rescue crews at Ground Zero. Both were extremely stressed out at what they had been through and seen (both definately had Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome) and after 5 minutes of screaming at each other to find out how they were going to get through it all, ended up by screaming "Why are we screaming at each other?" To which they both screamed back "I don't know" and gave each other a tearful hug....sad, pathetic, but also slightly funny in a dark sort of way. Most catching to me though, happened about 3 days after the event, when people started gathering near Ground Zero to leave wreaths and pictures of lost loved ones, when a woman, grief all over her face, sat down on the ground and in chalk letters, scribbled, "The American Flag provokes revolution". She had an insight into something believed by large numbers of people around the world (currently, myself included) and had the balls to voice her feelings. Some of her own countrymen, enraged by what she had written and perhaps blinded by bigotry and patriotism, started to pour water on the writing and erase her work. That part of the show ended up with some twat shouting about how he was prepared to enlist and die for what "they" had done to "his" country and some other tosser throwing back in his face something along the lines of "Why is it your country? It's God's country". {Start of rant} Americans, if you want to make a difference to the world, petition your illustrious leader to get your troops out of countries that are not called "the USA" (oops, that would be ALL OF THEM), expect to trade for much-needed oil (instead of invading those countries for whatever reason), and instead of just cancelling debts to "poor nations", help them to become prosperous by skilling them up to their advantage (not just your own). That way the world would be (more) peaceful...and not so anti-American as it is these days. {End of rant}
Finally, I believe there can be no justification for terrorist (or freedom fighter, depending on your views) violence, but there do come times when people get totally fed-up banging their collective heads against walls, and something snaps...then what other option do they have?