What were the days and weeks following 9/11 like?

I wasn't born just yet so I have no memory, but I'm curious to know more about the days immediately/weeks/months following September 11th, 2001. In the novel I am currently working on, in one chapter, the main character reflects on his high school years (2000-2004; he would probably be high school sophomore on 9/11). Like were concerts and sports events cancelled? Were flights cancelled? Did people try to continue with their daily lives as normally as they possibly could or did they stay home more? Were schools cancelled? Any information like that would be greatly appreciated.

 

All flights were canceled, and the entire nation was in shock. I don't recall about concerts and sports. The recruiting offices for the armed forces were mobbed.

 

For me personally, it was my day off, and a co-worker called, waking me up out of a sound sleep, telling me to turn on my TV. I didn't stop watching for about 18 hours. Our daughter was sent home from school. My wife, who was pregnant with our second daughter, came home from work early. Flights were grounded or sent to the nearest airport. Some people lived in airports and hotels for days. The entire country shut down for a few days afterward. There was horror at what happened and a great wave of patriotism. People put up signs and flags. There was almost nothing else on the news for weeks.

Here's few "major" events.

9/11 News Coverage: 7:45 PM: Congress Sings "God Bless America" - YouTube

‘I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you’: George W. Bush’s bullhorn speech (fox29.com)

How Baseball and the Yankees Helped New York Heal Post 9/11 | President Bush First Pitch - ABC News (go.com)

The Concert for New York City - Wikipedia

There are entire newscasts on YouTube for you to watch. Remember, the internet was still in its infancy, so we were still pretty much a TV nation at the time.

9/11 As It Happened - YouTube

9/11 (2001) Live Coverage - FOX News - YouTube

Sept. 11, 2001: President George W. Bush learns about terror attacks at Sarasota school - YouTube

President George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress following 9/11 - Sept. 20, 2001 - YouTube

 

Yeah, on a more personal level for many of us it was shock disbelief and horror. I think it must be like what people experienced when JFK was shot. It just didn't compute for a long time, I was in stunned disbelief. It was too big, too horrible. It literally drew a hard line between the day before and the day of. The before-time was pleasant and happy and nice, and suddenly the rug had been pulled out and it seemed the entire world was unstable. Our entire idea of what the world and life was had been forever altered. Our innocence was stolen.

When I woke up that day it was all I could find on almost every channel, but I didn't understand what I was seeing. I tended to stay up late and sleep late, and I got up in the middle of the day. I just kept seeing footage of the towers with smoke pouring out of them, and I didn't understand what had happened. Even though I kept switching to different channels they were all showing the same thing, and talking as if everybody already knew what had happened, but I didn't. It took like an hour before I could piece it together. Both planes had already hit, and there was smoke pouring out of both buildings. The whole scene was just a huge apocalptic mass of confusion and horror. People walking around in the street like zombies. When I understood what had happened I just welled up with tears. Thousands of innocent lives lost just like that. And the news kept coming in about other sites throughout the day. And then at some point the towers collapsed. It was literally like waking up to a nightmare that would never end, just gradually fade into the past and we became slowly numb to it.

 

Oh yeah I remember seeing that photo of George Bush being told about 9/11 while at that school in Florida.

 

I definitely think my generation in particular has become so numb to big events like that, I mean we grew up with mass shootings, terrorist attacks, recession, climate change, so I guess we just got used to it sadly.

 

Well, none of that is at anything like the scale of 9-11, where literally thousands of innocent lives were destroyed in a moment. It was the event that marked the end of our world as we knew it and ushered in the era of domestinc terrorism. The government installed the TSA in airports, and as always said "It's only temporary folks, just until we get this all sorted out, and then things will go right back to normal." And of course as always it became permanent. There's still TSA in airports everywhere. All citizens who travel are still searched and treated like possible terorrists. It was the event that forced the beginning of the surveillance state we now live in. All the events since then are just dominoes falling in the wake of 9-11, spurred by it.

 

TSA and part of the logic behind it, never made sense to me. How much security are you actually going to get from near minimum wage people?

Add to that all the unvetted immigrants they allow in every year. That is not saying I think immigrants are bad, just that the lack of vetting is a weakness that bad actors can exploit.

 

All these reactions probably sound melodramatic to to a Gen Z kid who grew up with it, but it was the most successful terrorist attack ever by a long shot, and the first attack on the US in recent memory. There were plenty of people alive in 2001 who remembered Pearl Harbor, but that was different. It was a military target far from most of American civilization, and there was a higher level of alertness. The world was already at war.

9/11 caught us entirely by surprise. We woke up one random day and New York and Washington were under attack. It was terrifying. We didn't know for some time whether or not those four planes were the extent of the attack or just the beginning to a full-scale war. All flights were grounded and future flights cancelled indefinitely. All major gatherings were cancelled. A lot of schools were let out. We had no idea what was a target. We had no idea what was safe for a while.

24-hour news had already been a thing for some time, but a lot of us were glued to the TV and Radio all day as they cycled through most of the same information with little tidbits of new information every few hours. I was at work in an optical lab, so I had the radio on, and the rest of the staff kept coming back into the lab asking for updates, and I'd tell them what little had been added to the story, which usually wasn't much.

Seeing the towers fall that morning before work was devastating, but the first time I lost it and outright cried was listening to that radio in the lab. They started interviewing people who had gathered hoping to hear from loved ones who had been in or around the towers. They cried and pleaded for their parents or spouses or friends to please call if they heard this report. It was late enough in the day that you knew most of the people they were looking for would have contacted them by then if they were able. I'm choking up just remembering. Later, there were giant bulletin boards set up in the area with hundreds of "Have you seen this man?" and "Please call if you're alright" posters stapled layers deep. The human element of the tragedy was hard to watch.

The only upshot was that the country came together. Everyone felt and behaved as if we were on the same side. Partisan strife melted away, and we felt like Americans. This was unfortunately to be short lived, however. The moment US troops set foot in the Middle East, political opinions flared again. Suddenly there was a new division. In many people's eyes, you were either pro war or pro terrorist. Even the president said, "Either you're with us, or you're against us." It was a scary time to dissent, but the other side saw no point in going to war with a country that wasn't responsible for the attack. There was pure hatred across the aisle once more, but the stakes were higher. The parties have agreed on very little since, and tensions were higher at that time, I think, than they have been since. People talk about being more divided now than we ever have been, but people have short memories. It was a rough time.

 

It didn't strike me as hard as the President being assassinated. Before his assassination, there were conflicts but it seemed we would work it out eventually. After, we had the Tower shooter in Austin, the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders, the Kent State massacre, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, a lying, conniving President (Nixon) caught in the act, attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan, the PLA blowing up the Israeli athletes at Munich 1972, the Iran hostage situation, and many other events.

Don't get me wrong - the event was horrifying, but for me personally, it wasn't a surprise after everything since Dealey Plaza November 1963. I was in the 4th grade and will never forget that day.

 

That day and for several there after, America saw what heroes law enforcement and firefighters are. How quickly the public forgets.

I remember hearing about a study years ago, that said a gold fish has about 15 seconds of memory. Which seems longer than the American public.

 

This.

 

The Twin Towers (World Trade Center) were really massive structures. About 50,000 people worked there and 140,000 visited there during a typical weekday. I used to see those towers from my apartment window when I was a kid. I went up the observatory several times.

I studied in San Francisco in 2001. I remember the silence during 9-11. The streets of downtown San Francisco were empty and I think everyone was watching the news at that time. For several days, all of the (non-cable) channels aired the news. There was no regular broadcasting. Then Bush said not to let terrorism stop our normal way of life. I don't remember when exactly he said that, but I remember people starting to eat at the restaurants some days after 9-11. The restaurants in my area were full. The school semester began as usual. I went to the first day of my university class. I remember the unity the people felt for one another. And I remember a woman who worked at CompUSA singing aloud. I think it was a hymn. The malls were still empty of customers. It took some time for things to look completely back to normal. In his first day of the show since 9-11, Conan O'Brien said that he didn't know how to continue on with the show as usual and was afraid that the normal way of life would be gone forever. He clearly wasn't in the mood to be funny, nor did he feel that it was the right time. He managed to do the show successfully, although he was more subdued with his jokes than usual. People continued to talk about 9-11 on television. But the sense of unity was gone in 2003 when Iraq was invaded. Many people were against it, but were silent about it at first. Those who expressed their disagreement with the war were accused of being traitors or being anti-Americans. And they were accused of being against the soldiers. In reality, people who opposed the war were also thinking of the soldiers. I remember the radio stations banning the Dixie Chicks because they spoke up against Bush. I was hated by everyone in my classroom because I too was against the war in Iraq. (I wasn't straightforward about it. I'll explain: it was in an advertisement class. Our assignment was to make an ad for CompUSA. (The ad wouldn't actually be used by CompUSA). Back home, I asked people on the internet the first thing that came to their minds about CompUSA. An English guy responded with Bush in a Captain America outfit. I liked the idea. The students were clearly disgusted by my ad. The professor looked very uncomfortable about it. They were all supportive of Bush and thought I was mocking him, which was kind of true. To be fair, that ad would've been a financial disaster if CompUSA actually used it). My cousin's uncle supported the war. He glared at me for a long time after I expressed my opinion. I assumed that we were in the minority until I saw a massive and peaceful antiwar protest in San Francisco near my home. There were a lot of them. They filled the streets and stretched far back for several blocks. Drivers honked in support for the protestors and workers in the office buildings waved at us. I remember a guy with his megaphone yelling, "what do we want?" A lot of the protesters yelled, "peace!" The guy yelled, "when do we want it?" The protesters yelled, "now!" This repeated on and on. I followed the protesters. It was a very friendly atmosphere. I brought my camcorder and the protesters waved at me while I was recording. One woman walked up to me as she danced and said, "nice pants!" Large numbers of the police blocked us. We just moved back to the other direction. A lot of the protestors were returning home by that time. I'm pretty sure that everyone who accused me of being a traitor are antiwar now. I don't see any American supporting a war nowadays.

 

I was about four when Kennedy was assassinated. I just remember the neighborhood being very quiet.

 

I think you mean "Dissent."

 

The assassination was also a big shock to me although I was born long after it happened. I was in the first grade when I saw the assassination being broadcasted. This was a time when Kennedy and his assassination were talked about on television a lot. It wasn't the first time that it was broadcasted, probably the third or fourth. It was the first time that I saw someone get killed for real. And I had known how Kennedy looked and that he was the president before I watched the assassination. The assassination is rarely mentioned now.

The assassination wasn't broadcasted live. 1975 was the first time that it was broadcasted, and I assume that the shock at that time was similar to when it happened in 1963. The broadcast of it raised conspiracy theories that continue to be debated today. But judging from the comments on YouTube, it wasn't the first time that the people sensed a conspiracy theory. It was the shooting of Oswald that sparked it. The assassination was also shown publicly at the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969. I don't know how many people watched it at that time. I assume that there weren't many.

 

When I first saw the headline about a plane hitting the WTC, I thought of a small plane, and recalled hearing that years earlier an Air Force plane had hit the Empire State Building; so I thought it was a simple accident. But when I saw the second plane hit (on TV) I realized it was an airliner and it had obviously been flown directly at the tower. Then the towers collapsed. The next few days were an endless stream of broadcasts of smoking ruins. We put a flag on our apartment balcony. Everyone was in a sort of quiet shock. I recall emailing my good friend and saying that whatever happened, at least we had had a good friendship. I recall babysitters coming and going for our 4-year-old twins, and the sort of quiet calm and anticipation beyond words. I recall being impressed by the U.S. strikes against Bin Laden and anxiety when it appeared that war would be launched with uncertain objectives.

Then the slow return to a new normal.

 

I recall sitting in the law office conference room with one of the attorneys, watching the second tower collapse. I said, "I can't think of a single mportant thing I have to do today." She nodded, said, "Me, neither." That was the last thing either of us said for a long time until she added, "Well, we're at war. We just don't know who with."

 

The attacks were horrible in themselves, but I felt that the media transmitted it in an almost pornographic way, to maximize outrage and grief. And it worked. It was like that scene in the Starship Troopers movie where the news is blasting the skyrocketing death toll from the asteroid and everyone is running to the recruiters' office. It felt to me like if Bush had declared himself president for life, that he would be rounding up all Middle Easterners, and then nuked a couple countries, most of the country would have been fine with it. Even people I regarded as rational critical thinkers became pretty bloodthirsty. When people reminisce about the wonderful national unity that emerged from 9/11 that's what it really amounted to.

 

Obviously. Don't call people out on typos.

 

That is certainly one way of looking at it, though I have to disagree.

 

I thought the same. It wasn't the headline for me though. My mom called me while I was still in bed. I heard about the plane hitting the tower from my answering machine. It was when I began to watch the news and saw the second tower get hit that I realized that we were being attacked.

 

Even after all these years, when I drive through Pennsylvania, I stop at the flight 93 memorial for a moment of silence. Of all the flights used in the attack that day, the passengers on that flight fought back, even knowing they would not survive.

 

My brother was giving a training at a company in NJ right across the river at the time. He looked out the window and saw the second plane hit. He gathered his personal belongings, ran to his rental car, and drove back to Ohio because he knew if he didn't get out immediately he'd be stuck there indefinitely.

I was driving home after dropping my ex at work and heard it on the radio. I couldn't believe it. I turned on the TV when I got home and my older kids and I watched in stunned shock.

I remember people coming together to pray. Churches were packed. People lined up around the block to give blood. Sadly, anyone who even looked to be of Middle Eastern descent was treated horribly in some areas. Some mosques were attacked.

Mostly I remember the news footage of the following days - rescue workers searching for hours, the cheers when someone was brought out from the rubble, the tears, the shot of an exhausted Golden Retriever asleep on his handler's pack. It felt so unreal, like some horrible dream you couldn't wake from.