Tag: World Trade Center

A World Where That Can Happen

Random Thoughts

September 11th, 2001 was a tragic day for a great many people.  Myself, being unemployed at the time, I spent the entire day in front of the TV and talking to friends over the Internet.  For some random reason that morning, I’d turned on the TV and it was on CNN.  I think there had been some special news report or something I’d been watching before bed the night before.  I was actually watching when the first reports of something hitting the World Trade Center came in, and I stayed there all day.  I don’t think I even took a break for food until dinner that night.

As tragic as that day was, however, it was the next day, September 12th, when everything sunk in, when the ripples of the event started to be felt, when the world became a different place than it had been just two days before.  Terrorism, of course, was not new.  People had been dealing with attacks like that, though not in the same scope, for a very long time.  Suicide bombers in cafés and other public places were old hat in some parts of the world.  Even hijackings and blowing up planes was something that had, to some degree, become accepted as a possibility.  The largest ripple coming from the September 11th attack was simply that we now lived in a world where that could happen.  A world where someone can fly a plane into a building, not on accident, not a small plane as a personal act of suicide, but a large passenger flight turned in to a weapon that can bring down a building and kill thousands.  On September 10th, it was unthinkable by most people.  On the 11th, it happened.  On the 12th, it was added to the list of possibilities, or if it had already been there, its rank on the list of probabilities rose.  It went from being some 1-in-a-million things to an event that happened, and now proven effective an event that would be planned again.

One of the tracks at Dragon*Con is called Apocalypse Rising.  It is a very odd track compared to many of the other fandom based tracks like Star Wars and Star Trek and the Whedon Universe because it lives in two worlds.  On one side you have zombies and an array of Sci-Fi movies and books, and people talk about their favorite “end of the world” and they wear Mad Max costumes and pretend to hunt zombies.  On the other side, you have panels with people who are well versed in the practical procedures of surviving disasters talking about the things you can do, the things you should do.  It is in the second half where discussions about the inevitability of larger events happen.  We talk about how the September 11th event was a shock to the United States and most of the world, and about how technology advances, and arms caches of fallen regimes make their way into the market, and how once upon a time people used to discuss about the remote possibility that a nuclear weapon or other massively destructive thing might one day be unleashed on a city in the US or the UK, and how events like sarin gas being released on a Tokyo subway and September 11th and more have turned that remote possibility into an eventuality, about how we’ve stopped talking about “if” something will happen but “when” it will happen.  And it all reminds me of a line from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

Somber thoughts for a sunny Saturday, I know, but I can’t help it.  Its on my mind and it had to come out somewhere.  On a brighter note, I’m alive, I’m in love, and while I may not have everything that I want, I want everything that I have, and that’s a pretty nice place to be.

It has been eight years since that day, and other lengths of time from other tragic days.  To those that we’ve lost, I wish them rest.  To those they’ve left behind, I wish them restoration.  And hopefully “when” will be a very long way off.

So many yesterdays gone by.

Random Thoughts

In some ways, it still doesn’t seem real. I’m sure that those directly affected by the tragedy of 9/11 would disagree, but to someone who wasn’t, it’s still just hard to believe that it happened.

I remember that day well… I had just woken up. Jodi was gone to work. I settled in to do my usual job hunting since I was unemployed at the time. Flipping on the TV, it was on CNN… I had been watching some silly report on jobs the night before when I finally drifted off to sleep. The anchor cut in on the news and said they were going live to where a plane appeared to have crashed into the side of the World Trade Center in New York.

Immediately they pointed out that this wasn’t the first such event… once upon a time, a plane had hit the Empire States Building. Of course, that was a small bi-plane I believe, and this was a passenger jet.

I watched, eyes wide open, in shock and a little horror as the events of the day played out… a second plane hit the other tower. Then the Pentagon got hit. Another plane went down in Pennsylvania. Then the towers fell…

Three years of yesterdays have passed since then, and still the event weighs so heavily on the United States. I think I finally understand how my parents, and their parents before them, felt about Pearl Harbor. Only, in a way, they got satisfaction. The US retaliated against Japan, we bombed them, and then with the first and last use of Atomic weapons in combat we took them out of the war. Today, there is no country to bomb, there are no people to bomb. The World Trade Center was a terrorist attack carried out by people who fight for an ideal, not for a flag. And how do you fight an ideal?

We’ve attacked them as best we could… removing a regime that supported them, the Taliban… but we haven’t stopped them, they still take and execute prisoners. Japan was stopped because we showed them that the losses to themselves would be too great to pursue their course… but Al Queda… they are all willing to die for their ideal, so even 99% losses isn’t enough to stop them. Fighting terrorism is like punching water, it shifts and moves but you never damage the water. And deep inside, down in the places where only my fear of death lives, its now joined by a fear of a war that will not end. A war against people without a country, without a flag, without borders or a homeland… a war against an ideal.

I extend my deepest sympathies to all of those who lost someone in the 9/11 tragedy, and to all of those who have lost someone in the following three years of trying to find and fight the ideals of terrorism.

And lastly, I extend my sympathies to the administration that has had to deal with a situation unlike any that has come before them. They’ve done about as good a job as can be expected, despite what those who oppose them would have you believe.

2004

Random Thoughts

So, another year ends.

In 2001 I had a pretty horrible year. I got caught in the downturn of the economy for IT professionals and what should have been 1 or 2 weeks between jobs turned into 5 months. Then some shitheads flew a couple of planes into the World Trade Center, and what should have been 5 months turned into 8. I actually had 3 interviews lined up for the few days after 9/11, but by 9/12 every one of them closed their doors in a hiring freeze. I think the tragedy of 9/11 is exactly that. It was the worst single day in the lives of lots of people, but more than 2 years away from the shock and awe of that event, I mostly only recall that it extended my unemployment for 3 months, and added in excess of two thousand dollars to my already mountainous pile of debt.

In all honestly, when 2002 rolled around, I figured that I had just survived the worst year of my life. And as 2002 progressed, I felt that was accurate… until December 31st, 2002. That was the day my mother called me to let me know that she had cancer.

2003, as it turns out, would wind up dwarfing 2001 in personal pain and hardship. From day 1 life started to spiral downward as my mother started her chemo treatments. In February, we found out that the cancer was terminal, but that she had 2 years or more left because she was responding well to the treatment. In March, due to complications of a prior surgery, chemo had to be stopped and my mother entered the hospital. On March 17th, my mother came home from the hospital. Because the treatments had been stopped, and because of the prior surgery, the cancer had spread quickly. On March 26th, my mother passed away.

The rest of the year followed as many might expect. My mother was very important to me, and the loss of her darkened everything. Everyone in my family had to go through their first birthday without her around… first Halloween, first Thanksgiving, and first Christmas. 9 months later and everyone in my family is outwardly okay, but I know for myself that inside it still hurts.

So what does 2004 promise to bring?

More of the same unfortunately… Everyone keeps telling me it will get easier, but so far, the only person I believe is the one who said, “My father has been dead for 13 years, and it still hurts.” Hopefully though, there will be more to this year, and in some ways, after even only 2 days into it, there already is as I’ve been (sort of) given a promotion at work. No extra pay, but more responsibility. We’ll have to wait and see how that all works out…

2004… one day at a time…

12 September 2001

Random Thoughts

Yesterday
The World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists. The Pentagon was also attacked. Four airplanes were hijacked to do this destruction.
Sounds like some hot new action flick starring Arnold or Sylvester or even Wesley. But it’s not. It’s real.
I told some friends yesterday that I kept blinking my eyes, like I was trying to wipe away the last remnants of a bad dream. And it was true. I spent the entire day in utter disbelief that this could be happening.
There have been other attacks on the U.S. by terrorists in the past. But each of those existed in a world of “isolated incidents”. Yesterday was a concerted, organized, deliberate effort to end lives. No kid with a truck of fertilizer parking next to a building, but hijacked airplanes diving down at the world below that no amount of security or protection could avoid, let alone stop.
Terrorism has existed for a long time. But to us in the United States, except for “isolated incidents”, it was a news story, a movie, a book, a television show. It was on the other side of the glass, over the fence, in the neighborhood down the street. It was second hand, rumor. Yesterday it became real.
For thousands of people yesterday, life came to a sudden and final halt. Minutes before they were probably looking, like most of us who exist in a corporate world, forward to the weekend, even though one had just ended. They joked. They gossipped. They smiled. They laughed. They stressed. They loved. They died.
For millions of people yesterday, life as they knew it came to a sudden and final halt. The world crashed down around their ears. Some of them ran. Some of them stayed. Some of them charged into the discord to see if perhaps they could calm the storm, or perhaps just drag one life from the jaws of death and into the world of tomorrow.
For billions of people yesterday, a dream came to a sudden and final halt. The United States has for 200 years been the beakon of freedom and hope for those both within and outside her borders. The dream of the perfect life in the land of plenty is something that people from all over the world think about. Even if they never work toward it themselves, they knew it existed and that people actually lived there in safety and peace.
There is a dream that is America. It still exists, but for most that dream now seems further away than ever. Where it used to be just out of reach, within our grasp, it is now a few paces away, easier to see than to touch. And in seeing the dream, we see that it is tarnished.
We will recover. America will be strong. Woe be to those who have for the second time in a century tempted fates and awoken the sleeping giant.
Life will go on. People will work. People will live, and love, and hate, and laugh, and cry, and die. People will fly in airplanes, although perhaps giving a second glance to all those passengers who made it through the new security checks. People will visit tall buildings to look out and the beautiful skylines of cities all over the world.
But these people are not the same people from last week. They are more like those of 1941. The people of the United States today have been touched by something that leaves no thing unchanged. Its a message. “Time is short. Life is precious. Live.”
Me? I’m off to get a job. Life goes on, there are bills to pay, and I’ve spent too much of my short precious time here on this Earth doing nothing waiting for life to take me along for the ride.
It’s well past time I put both hands on the wheel.
I’m driving from now on.