Saturday, September 11, 2010

Where were you?

Many people are posting this on Facebook today. I wanted to answer it, and it turns out I'm more longwinded than an update allows. Big surprise?
I was in Disney World. We had arrived on Saturday and gone to the Night of Joy. Like I was going to let Micheal W. Smith, Plus One, and Jars of Clay be performing near me and not see it? MWS had a new CD coming out on the 11th that I had pre-ordered. I kept joking that because I was there they should arrange for me to get it early or something. It was a rainy, but we had fun. My Mom commented on how nice the teens at the concert were. They weren't anything like the ones the news shows. I agreed, because working with the youth at church made me quite aware of this.
On Tuesday, we were getting ready to go to the Magic Kingdom when they said something was happening at the Trade Center on the morning show. For some reason, I thought of how there are always protests at the World Trade Organization meetings and that they must be meeting at the Trade Center. My Mom came in from taking the trash out and I told her. We thought it was a small plane. We were wondering how you could evacuate the people over the place the plane crashed. We were watching as the 2nd plane hit. I remember saying that the building was swaying but saying no, it's the wtc - it can't fall over. We went to the park. I remember being on Pirates of the Caribbean and as the pirates attacked the town, wondering if there was a navy about to launch an attack on NYC out there. We rode several rides and were fairly distracted when we couldn't get on a ride. OK, we'll go into the Haunted Mansion. When we came out, all the rides were closed. Rumors were flying about the Pentagon and a car bomb at the State Department. People kept asking why they wanted us at our hotels/campgrounds. I thought that if we were attacked, the bodies would be much easier to identify if we were at the hotel with our registration. A pretty gruesome thought. We boarded a boat. I ended up sitting on a ledge by a window as we were all crowded. I realized that the country was going to war. We couldn't let someone do this to us without reprecussions. I was 24. My classmates who had enlisted were going to be the ones who were fighting the war. I started going through lists of people in my mind and praying for them, that God would keep them safe in whatever followed.
I called my office when we got back to the camper. The company had brokers and reinsurers in the building. They had already closed for the day. Many got out safely. I know there's a VP who has saved an email that he received from the 19th floor of Tower 2 at 8:55 in the morning. Later, I read that Marsh and Aon employees made up 65% of those who were killed. At one point the following month, Shirley was trying to get something fixed with Aon. The response was that they were trying, but all the clerical people had been killed and their managers as well. They were stuck trying to find someone who could work the system before they could make any adjustments. Aon was one of the companies that was being investigated by Elliot Spitzer a few years ago. I wondered if the problems stemmed from being forced to bounce back so quickly from the attack. After all, it was the executives that were killed, just the replaceable clerical people which is so so untrue.
Where were you?

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