I think people rushed to memorialize it too quickly.
I'm retired and I used to make movies. On Sept. 11 I was living and working in Brooklyn. I had a shoot scheduled for the following week. I was supposed to fly up there with my friend, and cameraman, Steve. And we happen to know somebody in Halifax who did sound. And that was all planned, the doctor was recruited and her patients were recruited and so forth and so on. So I felt like I really have to keep this date. I supposed I could have said, the world is quite strange. Let's reschedule. But I couldn't think of that. I didn't think of that and I kept calling my travel agent. Finally he said, "look, John there will be no airplane. Gas up your car." So we did. And that's when things even got stranger. Because my experience for the first six days or so it was very much Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was a very local thing and then suddenly it became apparent that maybe this isn't so local. At first, it seemed like, why are they putting flags over overpasses? The way you get to Halifax is you drive to Portland, Maine, via Boston, of course. And so it first started on Merritt Parkway, which has overpasses every quarter mile, they all had flags everywhere. And then we got to Portland, and headed down somewhere and got on the boat, strange little ferry arrived the next morning in Halifax, drove the car off the boat, and here were the flags. I was trying to understand why this was happening. I mean, it made perfect sense after all. I mean all of aviation had been shutdown. I think people rushed to memorialize it too quickly. It was "how are we going to build a monument?" when the event was one or maybe two years old. Whereas I don't think monuments to previous wars didn't happen immediately.
John Armstrong
