A year ago today

A year ago today I was in meeting with colleagues who'd come over from other offices. I heard someone say just after lunchtime that "America had been attacked", but no more details. This would have been just after 2pm UK time, a few minutes after the first plane hit.

I tried accessing the BBC News web site, but the site was inaccessible. This wasn't uncommon; the Internet gateway had limited bandwidth and was frequently down. We continued through the day's meetings with an increased sense of foreboding that something terrible had happened, only we didn't know what. The BBC site was still inaccessible all afternoon; I tried hitting 'reload' whenever there was a break in the meeting, but to no avail. I didn't occur to me to try any smaller sites or message boards.

The meeting finally broke up about 5.30pm, and before leaving for home I tried accessing Dreamlyrics, the web-based RPG community. There was a thread labelled Terrorist Attack. For a while I couldn't believe what I was reading; the awful reality of what happened hadn't really sunk in.

Even from a continent away it felt numbing; I find it impossible to imagine the impact this must have on Americans. Europe has suffered from occasional terrorist outrages, and had seen cities attacked and leveled during World War II - The continental US had seen nothing of the kind; up till now America had never had to fight a war on home territory.

There were people that said America had it coming; it was a punishment for their support for corrupt regimes in the middle-east. But those on the European left who said such things are as just as wrong as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson's idiotic assertion that it was God's punishment for American's tolerance of homosexuality. Such people are no more representative of the great mass of European people as Falwell and Robertson are of America.

Nothing justifies killing three thousand innocent people just to make a political point.