Thread by @SonyKapoor

As I catch up on a rich, moving, diverse set of reporting and stories about 9/11 in a very emotional morning full of sobs, anger and vivid memories here is my recollection of the day’s events. My girlfriend at the time, Vibeke Fonnesbech and I had just come back from NYC where

We had visited my old offices, met friends and dined at the word trade centre where I had been working a few months before. I was at work, trading derivatives, on the phone to a broker in the WTC, when the first plane hit. He did not make it

We watched in horror the scenes from NYC when someone in the room screamed at the sight of the second plane headed straight towards the WTC and the sickening - let the ground swallow me - moment that followed when the plane hit and many of our lines with colleagues went dead

Many of them did not make it and I lost several friends, acquaintances and colleagues on the day …

But the most shocking thing that happened to me on the day was when my colleague, an Ivy League graduate form the Midwest opened the atlas to the Balkans looking for Afghanistan

And then and for several days after was the most vocal proponent at work for “bombing them out of existence” “them” being #Afghanishtan even though he was looking at the wrong continent trying to find the county on the map

And later that week, on my birthday, I heard a Fox News commentator ask on prime time TV - “why don’t we drop a nuke on #Afghanistan”

That week, you could spot most brown immigrant homes from a distance in the Midwest, often the ones with the biggest American flags as all brown

folks became suspect, especially anyone wearing Muslim garb. Attacks against minorities rose, some Sikhs were mistaken for Arabs and killed … and the rest as they say, is history. It was an insightful, if emotionally challenging few months to spend in the Midwest of the US that

Is now prime Trump territory. The raw emotion of the day, the sense of loss that still hits the pit of my stomach, the sheer ignorance of even many highly educated Americans, the instinctive call to violence, the undercurrent of #racism & #bigotry - I see a clear line 9/11 - 1/6

I miss the friends & colleagues I lost on 9/11, & I miss the otherwise generous warm & caring colleagues in the Midwest who I was with on the day sharing our collective grief & pain. But it’s important not 2 sugarcoat the ignorance, arrogance, hubris & bigotry of the days after.

Found a picture that Vibeke took of me days before 9/11 when I took her up to “windows on the world”atop the WTC for lunch and we then went to the viewing gallery.

And another pic of my sis who visited me in the months before when I lived in battery park city

9/11 led to a huge spike in racist attacks against #muslims (and other minorities) …

This is the kind of stuff I personally witnessed in the American Midwest till I moved back from the US Christmas of 2001

bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3c…