2002-09-12 - 12:34 a.m.

Apparently they're playing the television coverage from last year minute for minute. I haven't watched TV all day but I was just chatting to someone online and they said tongue in cheek "The South Tower just fell" so I assume that's what she meant.

This time last year the horror was less than two hours old. I was at work on night shift- 8.46am in New York translates to 10.46pm in Sydney. Sometime after 11pm the husband of one of my co-workers rang the lab and said that someone flew a plane into the World Trade Centre. I thought terrorism rather than accident, with no other information than that, but I was imagining a suicidal pilot in a little Piper aeroplane I think. They said it was a passenger jet- I quickly turned the radio on. I was listening to it on the way home, rushed inside and turned the television on. Told my flatmate who had been sitting in bed unaware reading to come out and see the news. That was before the second tower collapsed. I would have stayed up until about 1.30am (11.30am New York time) watching the coverage.

I'm glad I was at work tonight, and stayed away from TV all day, because after all I said in my other entry on the topic a couple of days ago, I am an incurable voyeur and I'm ashamed of it. If I was still living away from home rather than having my parents asleep a room away from the TV I'd be up there watching it now, minute for minute, unable to look away even though it's all a year old, drawn into the past. Even though the way it's been treated a year on disgusts me to an extent. Even though I'm of the opinion that the tens of thousands that died of starvation in third world countries on that very same day last year have lives just as valid and tragic as those who died in New York. Perhaps more tragic because nobody blinked. Nobody gave them a minutes silence. Nobody shone beams of light into the sky for them. Nobody cried but their direct family, if they weren't already dead. Despite all that I can't resist the emotive manipulative media coverage. I am a self confessed junkie. And I think I have a morbid fascination. And it worries me a little.

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