9/11 thoughts

It's coming up on 5 years since 9/11 which in itself is incredible to me. Feels like maybe 2 years. But that's the whole 16 hour day thing, which is another whole topic.
I never understood why people remembered where they were when big events happened. When the Challenger blew up I was in Social Studies class with Miss Z and they came over the loudspeaker and announced it but that's all I remember. It wasn't a huge thing for me. It's not something that comes up much in conversation anyway.
But 9/11--oh yeah, I remember it so clearly. I wonder why? I was sitting at my desk around 9:00 and Steve Pincott, one of the engineers, came down the aisle saying that a plane hit the world trade center. I thought it was just some kind of accident. I envisioned a little plane like the ones that land at the Meriden airport. I tried to go onto some news sites and couldn't log onto any of them because they were all bogged with traffic. Eventually I broke a rule and installed AOL and logged onto THEIR news and saw the 2nd plane had hit and that it wasn't an accident. By then it was around 9:30. By 10:00 all work had stopped. They had set up a TV in the breakroom and everyone was in there watching TV. We saw the towers fall. I remember seeing my boss, a big huge guy (I think he was something like 6'6") crying. And it didn't matter because everyone was crying. I was doing math in my head--how many people just died while I watched on TV? How many fit in that tower? I thought at least a 100,000--the actual death toll later of only a few thousand still seems wrong to me. Not that it affected their families any less.
That night my husband had friends over and I watched CNN. I watched that 2nd plane hit over and over. I watched burning people leaping out of buildings to their death. I hated every second of it but I couldn't turn it off.
I have been a cnn.com addict every since. I think just about every day I've gone there for at least a few minutes. Funny isn't it? I never went to that site before.
In a certain way, Hurricane Katrina had a similar effect on me. It was so wrong to see dead bodies lying out in the open, rotting, in a major US city. A city I had been to twice. To watch people trapped on their rooftops by fire AND flood, dying, because there was no one to help them.
This world has gone horribly wrong. I don't see anymore how it can be turned around, how anything can ever be okay again.
I've gone twice to see "An Inconvenient Truth" and it's just depressing. We're on such a downward spiral. We really do need to go extinct. But it won't happen. No matter what Mother Nature throws at us in one place we just breed more in another place.