story9528.xml

story9528.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-09-10

Being so far away time-zone wise from the "rest" of the world, I was woken up by a phone call from Turkey. Still dumbfolded and half asleep, I heard the shivering voice of a relative that New York was being attacked and that 50,000 people had died. I couldn't believe what I was being told and hoped that this was just a cruel jokes. Before I could go to the living room to turn on the TV, I got a second phone call from my husband who was deployed. When I finally turned on the TV, the images of the towers burning, the planes deliberatly crashing into them, then the other news about the Pentagon and Pennsylvenia were completly unreal. All I could think about was why the pilots who were flying these planes, asuming that it was a hijacked plane and the pilots having guns hold to their heads; why in the world would they crash these planes into the heart of New York? Into our hearts?

When I first came to the United States 13 yrs. ago, walking in downtown Seattle, between the high rise buildings, it took my breath away. I was all dazzed by the magificant genious of creating such a beautifull reach into the skies. I felt as if I could have walked up the buildings like super(wo)man of some kind. Why was this happening?

September 11th has been often portraited as an attack against us as Americans, but it was much more than that! It is the clash between the ages; our modern version of the clash between neanderthales and homo sapien sapiens perhaps. My child sometimes ask me why this happened, I'm not sure if I can comprehend the hate of these people. And how to explain such a thing. I ask my elders "what is happening?". One German friend of mine; a philosoph, an active pacifist and a retired physician, a WWII survivor, told me that he's happy that he is not as young as we are and that it was rather unlikely that he'd be topped with something worse than September 11th during his remaining lifetime.