I heard the news today, oh boy

August 18, 2008 6:38 AM

It was just a normal day in Seattle and the noise from the King County Airport was as loud as ever as we pulled into our Georgetown driveway after a week camping in the hills down south. By the next afternoon the airport was quiet and the world was a different place. How would we have felt if we'd come home two days later, say on 9/13, to the silence and subdued folk. And the news...

I want to know what it would have been like to be out in the forest or the desert or on a boat or otherwise out of contact with the news until some days after 9/11 (or at another time with another major social-impact event).

What was it like to encounter news of the event days after it had happened, days after everyone else knew about it / had been changed by it?

The response one would have in this situation interests me a great deal.

Has it happened to you?

posted by Kerasia to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

Not even close to very descriptive but makes you think. Friends of mine were on a RTW trip for about a year and were in Africa when it happened. People kept trying to ask them about it but they didn't understand what they were talking about. They cut their trip short and came home early.
posted by thilmony at 6:55 AM on August 18, 2008

oh 2nd thought, this might be more metatalk, it's chatty - there will be no definitive answer to this question you can choose as "best answer"
posted by thilmony at 6:56 AM on August 18, 2008

I think one would have a greater sense of disbelief until seeing evidence. A sense of disconnection and foreignness- you would have literally (in a non-physical sense) returned to a different world than you'd left.

Reminds me, on a totally different but somehow similar scale, the experience of astronaut Dan Tani being stuck on the ISS when his mother got into a fatal car accident.

Not just the grief/shock/loss of the situation, but also a different kind of loss- the loss of not being able to experience the tragedy along side everyone else.
posted by gjc at 6:59 AM on August 18, 2008

My aunt was in Brazil when the Blair Witch Project was being hyped - she saw it on her first week back, and understood it to be a documentary. She found it extremely unsettling. When she found out it was a mockumentary she was confused at first, it took some time to sink in.
posted by mateuslee at 7:10 AM on August 18, 2008

Hard to compare Blair Witch to 9/11 but interesting. Reminds me of when the FDA declared some bad tomatoes in the US. I was in the UK and didn't hear about it. My first day back in the US I ordered my usual chicken sandwich at Arby's "hold the tomato" and the drive thru lady said "don't worry, we temporarily are not using tomatoes". I thought "good, because I don't like tomatoes on my chicken fillet" but I wondered if it was a marketing test or ??
posted by thilmony at 7:18 AM on August 18, 2008