[Reflection] In Remembrance of Sept 11th, 2001
I won't forget where I was when I heard the first plane had crashed into the first tower of the WTC. I was driving into to work listening to NPR and it was a perfect fall day. Things became much worse quickly after that.
To those who died 3 years ago today, and to those who died in the fallout of the years following it: rest in peace and may we know peace soon.
Links:
Web Archive of 9/11
911 Report
1 comment:
I too, will never forget where I was when I heard the news. I was dog-sitting at the house of a coworker of my mother: a friendly, if demanding Sheltie named Kelsie who needed to be let in and out, fed, etc. The dog woke me up early, much earlier than I usually would have been up at that time, and so I let the dog out, walked into the living room of this person's house, flipped on the television, and there was the second jet crashing into the tower. The event was obviously a big deal, up there for me with the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger on Januray 28, 1986, and for those that were around at that time (I was just a twinkle in my mother's eye), certainly the death of JFK in Dallas (trivia: Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis died the same day). The dog's owner was actually in New Jersey soon to get on a plane in NYC to Europe for vacation, but she never made it. She was stuck in New Jersey for a couple days, then just made her way back to Minneapolis, so my dog-sitting job was cut short.
The most personal thing is the fact that my brother had interviewed and nearly accepted a job with one of the financial companies in the WTC towers (he went to Chicago instead). If he had, he would have worked on the 70th floor of one of the towers, if memory serves.
About a week later I wrote an essay predicting some of the things I thought would happen in this country. The insane grief of the American people, the tearing up of civil liberties in this country, and the slipping end of any last illusions of American being a Republic, all in the name of protecting us against this kind of thing. In retrospect, most of what I predicted has come to pass. It is a real burden being right all the time.
Terrorism is something we will probably have to struggle with the rest of my lifetime. Pointless destruction of life for idiotic reasons seems to be a trend we cannot escape.
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