[dkarl]

Cognitive dissonance even for people who missed it. At the time I was in my early twenties, started my day late, and usually didn't check news until after getting a little bit of work done. When I got to work, nobody else was there, which was weird. There was a TV on an AV cart in the middle of a hallway, also a bit weird. There was a note from the CEO saying that everyone was going home to be with their families. That also seemed a bit weird, but I shrugged it off. Our CEO was a family values guy, very Christian, and I had heard he used to lead prayers in the office when the company was smaller. (It didn't occur to me that it was a Tuesday and everybody's families should be at school or work.) So I sat down with my coffee and started working. After a while, at a time that I guess would have been close to noon in New York, I went to cnn.com, which came up as a primitive-looking site without any media, so I chuckled internally and took a screenshot, thinking CNN had been hacked. How could CNN let themselves get hacked! I skimmed over the headlines thinking that the hackers would have put in something political or humorous, but I didn't see anything like that, and started to think, okay, this is CNN's real content, so their web site got hacked or otherwise impacted by something, so they put up the text site while they recover. I starting thinking about what could have affected their site like that, and then it dawned on me that the top headline might have something to do with it.

I know others have been downvoted for saying this, but for me the shocking nature of it took a while to sink in. I had not had a chance to travel much yet at that point. I had been to New York City once, just like I had been to Europe once and seen London and Paris and Rome. I came from a small town in Texas and had a habit of thinking of all of those places as the "real world" where big real things happened, places that had diplomats and stock exchanges and famous universities and celebrities and, well, terrorist attacks. The 9/11 attacks didn't violate that sense of order. On a gut, emotional level, it was just a real world type thing happening in a real world type place. It took me a while to understand why people were reacting so differently.