How afraid were you on 9/11?

I wasn’t afraid. I live in a city, but it is hardly an important city, and I knew there was no real reason to attack here. I do know lots of people in my area who were afraid of an attack though. If I lived in a more important location I probably would have been worried though.

I was so mad I wanted to throw up. No fear response at all. I do not live near a city, perhaps that prevented that emotion from settling in.

We gathered in my buildings cafeteria and just all kinda stared up at the screen. Frustrated anger all day long.

@amujinx I mean, I live in the middle of nowhere, as far as important locations go…. but wasn’t there more to fear than an actual attack that would directly affect you?

I don’t remember being afraid, but I do remember we watched it on the tv in the classroom (I was in 8th grade) and I said to the kid sitting next to me, “Hooooly shit…”
I remember being very sad for my teacher whose son worked near the twin towers. He ended up being ok, but seeing her so distraught as she watched with us on tv was heartbreaking.

I think I was sick that day, and ended up staying at home for the day. I saw a lot of it unfold on TV as it all went down…I didn’t really “feel” anything, except confusion over just what happened. I remember being dumbfounded whenever my folks told me just what happened. I only realized the gravity of the situation afterwards…seeing the stories about peoples loved ones who perished that day practically broke my heart.

I was afraid because I worked for the government and it was rumored they were attacking government buildings. No one could make a decision whether to close the office or not until about 2 p.m. When I got home, I couldn’t stay away from the television, transfixed with the things that were happening.

No.

Being in a plane at the exact time of the first planes crashing into the twin towers and then upon our emergency landing being greeted by the Indiana National Guard waving M-16 in our faces and a screaming GET THE HELL OUT OF THE TERMINALS…..*NOW!!!!!….I was about as scared as I have ever been! Pucker factor 10+ chaos at best.

@Cruiser definitely, I can’t imagine anyone not being afraid in your situation. Every time you tell that story I feel sick. Horrifying. :(

@ANef_is_Enuf Every time this question comes up I feel sick and horrified. The worst part is my suffering pales in compassion to survivors who lost loved ones that day or scraped through that rubble trying to save someone….anyone…. :(

@Cruiser I don’t think the circumstances can be compared, I don’t feel like suffering is relative. I do know, however, that my heart hurts to hear stories like yours just as much as when I hear stories of those who dealt with the brunt of it.

I was only 10 so I’m not sure I even knew what I was supposed to feel. I don’t think I fully comprehended the severity of what had happened at the time; I remember being shocked, but I don’t think I felt fear.

I don’t remember being afraid. I was deeply concerned, and very, very angry.
I watched the second plane crash into the WTC live on TV. Afterwards, I went to work, and listened to updates on the radio, and my wife sent me text messages about the Pentagon being destroyed, The House of Congress being blown up by a car bomb, and the fall of the WTC towers. As always, in wartime, truth is the first casualty.

No. I was pissed that everything was closed.

I work at a stock exchange in San Francisco that is a half block from the tallest building in the city, and would have been the West Coast target. We had people at work talking to people in the towers and at businesses within a block of Ground Zero.

We were all pretty shook and damn scared something would happen in downtown San Francisco. It wasn’t a screaming fear, but an underlying fear of the unknown. It was pretty bad. We all got out of the downtown by mid morning Pacific time.

I was more angry and upset than afraid. Angry that these cowardly and uncivilized evildoers would do such a horrible, unthinkable thing. I wanted revenge at first, seeing how so many poor innocent people died because of it, and it only made me so much more proud to be born in America.

Horrified? Yes. Afraid? No.

I figured it was terrorists from soon after I heard it wasn’t a small plane that had flown into the tower. I thought there was only so much they could do. I did not think they would come to Philadelphia, and even if they did, it wouldn’t be near me. To this day, I think the hysteria created by events like these is a severe over-reaction, and is precisely what the terrorists wanted to have happen. They won. No. They didn’t win. We gave them the victory by diverting gazillions of dollars to prevent some very low-probability events in our desire to make air travel 100% safe.

Do we spend money on traffic safety, where one quarter the dollars spend on air safety could save four hundred times as many people as are being saved by the new air traffici regulations? Of course not. Again, the terrorists not only won, but we continue to give them victory after sustained victory for a battle fought a decade ago. What a waste! All because of irrational fear. Then again, fear of dying in an airplane has always been vastly over done, and fear of dying in a car is vastly under done.

To those of you who said you were angry – was that your initial reaction, or was this after you learned what was going on?

At work, by the time the news hit our desks people were already saying terrorist attack.

I’m not like everyone else in that I was not scared or angry. I remember thinking about it at the time, and realized that I’d already lived through my own private 9/11. This was more of the same, only everyone else was experiencing it, sometimes for the first time.

I wasn’t in the United States at the time and I was at work when I heard the news. We weren’t afraid or angry just overwhelmed and wondering what the hell would happen next. I remember someone asking if he would be able to withdraw his money from the bank.

I wasn’t. I was just a mindless teen that didn’t know anything lol. I figured it was in NYC, and that wouldn’t happen in my small Oregon town.

I was at work & a television was on in the background. I was just getting on with stuff, when I happened to glance at the screen just as the second plane hit. My initial reaction was I thought it was a movie trailer, hadn’t even heard about the first strike as of that moment.
I wasn’t in any way afraid, being in the UK, I just remember being completely awe struck by the whole tragic affair.

Maybe I am jaded, but I wasn’t exactly afraid. More precisely, I was more afraid of America going to pieces afterwards, and the rise in Islamophobia has made those fears justifiable.

So now, we have a rather large, vocal group of people who want to curtail the freedoms of Muslim-Americans, bomb the Middle East to the Stone Age, and have gone so far as to accuse our President of being an Al Qaeda operative. I would say that that right there is proof that the terrorists won; they couldn’t destroy us, but they could (and did) make us destroy ourselves.

I wasn’t afraid or angry, at least not right away. A friend had just flown back to Orange, N.J. the day before, and I was freaking out until I heard from her. I remember feeling that this was the beginning of things never being the same again. There were insanely long lines for gas, no aircraft in the sky, and a quiet, all-pervasive “oh shit” vibe the rest of that day.

The part where I started getting angry was when the reactionaries took over. For the next couple of years, if you weren’t maniacally waving a flag and singing about how the sun shone out of Dubya’s butt, you were suspect. In the land of the free, suddenly marching in lock-step was the expectation. It’s not nearly so bad these days, but there are remnants such as the still-kicking “Patriot” Act. Like @jerv said, the terrorists laid the groundwork for us to destroy ourselves.

The only thing more important than security is freedom. In the days after 9/11 security began to seem more important and that was scary.

I was upset, but not actually afraid. It was far away – in another country, in fact – and it was New York. The city is a redshirt in modern cinema