September 11th 2001: After getting the kids (then 7 and 11 years old) off to school before 7:30, I had crawled into bed to try to catch a couple more hours of sleep.

Shortly after the second plane hits, my phone rings and it’s my brother in Radford (Virginia). IIRC, he had walked over to his girlfriend’s apartment after getting off work on the graveyard shift at the 7-Eleven at nine. He told me to turn on my TV.

Living down in an Appalachian holler, I could only pick up the local PBS affiliate clearly, and PBS stayed with their normal schedule of kids and educational programming during the day. I could pick up our local ABC affiliate, but reception was very snowy and barely watchable.

So, my brother spent the first part of the day relaying information to me that he was getting from CNN via his girlfriend’s cable. I tried tuning in the local NPR station on the radio. They were still running normal programming, as were the local commercial music stations. In Southern West Virginia, local radio stations were very slow in switching over to their respective network news feeds. I don’t think WV Public Radio switched over to Don Edwards over the national NPR feed until sometime after the Pentagon was attacked. My brother signed off from his girlfriend’s apartment to hear back over to his apartment, leaving me with a staticky Peter Jennings.

About a half-hour after hanging up, my brother calls me back. *HIS* cable has gone out. So, I spend the next few hours relaying what I’m hearing from ABC feeling like a looking-glass version of NBC’s Frank McGee relaying what he’s hearing over the telephone from Robert McNeil from Dallas in November 1963.

My brother’s reaction after the Pentagon was hit: “This is war.”
My reaction at the end of the day: Shock, mourning, and fear about exactly to what dark places our rage would take us as a society, what cruel impulses we would give into and justify, fears that over the last 20 years have proven to be well-founded.

And, yes, by late 2002 and early 2003, I couldn’t withstand the propaganda from the right-wing warbloggers anymore and surrendered to the darkness.