I see comments like this quite a bit on reddit. I live in a small town in Wisconsin, 9/11 didn't effect me directly. But I'll tell you I can account for almost every minute of that day. I was 21, going to college, but partying more. I still lived with my parents. I had gone out the night before, hard, and I didn't wake up until shortly before I was due to go to work at my job at a gas station. I walked down stairs to get ready for work and immediately was greeted by my mother saying, 'We're going to war.' What? Go to look at the tv and see what happened. The towers had fell already at that point. Absolute disbelief. No way could the most powerful country in the world let it's biggest city get destroyed like that. I can't emphasize how unbelievable this was at the time. Now we know there were warnings etc, but it was inconceivable at the time. GO to work and it was dead. We have a radio and it's still alarming because warnings for unaccounted planes are flashing. Sears tower was one target I remember. Then there started to be talk of oil aka as prices going through the roof. Wall street was shut down, the banks were going to collapse. I'll admit I was one of those who went and took my money out of the bank, I didn't have much as a struggling college student, I wanted to protect what I did have for the chaos that was being predicted. Then we started getting quite a steady stream of people coming in for gas, filling up vehicles, gas cans whatever. Within an hour the line was a mile long. Add in the incorrect reports on the radio of missiles starting to fly in Afghanistan and it felt like the end of the world. So just a bit of background for those who don't understand why anyone outside of NYC might have been traumatized by 9/11, it was planes unaccounted for with various targets being mentioned, you didn't know if they would be near you. A pretty wide belief the banks, economy, oil etc would crash. Fears of WW3, I'm not even kidding, with the talks of missiles that day it was scary. Everything about that day, to me, was unprecedented, fearful and so unbelievably chaotic.