Five years on from 9/11

It seems weird that we’re already five years on from 9/11. Much has changed in those five years.

I was working back in my Minimum Wage Hell that was the cinema at the time and I remember one of the projectionists coming down from his booth to say that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. 

I assumed he meant it was a stunt in a film he’d been watching, until he said he’d seen it on the news. From then on we took it in turns to watch the news coverage in the staff room. So I saw the second tower fall, live, in a state of numb disbelief.

This really was one of those events that just happened out of the blue. There were rumours, apparently dismissed in the upper echelons of the US government, but nobody really thought a war was going to kick off as a result of those rumours. But it did, and it has, and in many respects it’s going to be a long and dirty war fought on multiple fronts.

I worked in MWH with a number of Somali Muslim lads; all of whom were shocked and horrified by the events of 9/11. How any Muslim could launch such an attack was beyond them.

I imagine there’ll be loads of people blogging about this, talking about it on the radio, replaying the news footage on TV, and so on. Normally I don’t bother to comment on the things everyone else is talking about – what’s the point of adding one more voice to the maelstrom of conspiracy theorists, platitudinal pietists and would-be societal commentators? But, for what it’s worth, this is my story about 11 September 2001.