Monday memory: you know what today is

It's been 22 years of seared into my memory.

It’s been awhile since I told the story of where I was on 9/11. Let’s take a look back to a post I wrote on monoblogue many years ago that I may be able to supplement.

This is some of what I wrote that day, with revised and extended remarks on our current condition now that I think back on it.

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That day was a glorious Tuesday weatherwise, a perfect late summer day in northwest Ohio. At the time I was working for Hobbs and Black Architects, and as was normal on most mornings I had my headphones on listening to a CD when the phone rang. For whatever reason, I picked it up and it was my co-worker Larry who informed me that he would be in shortly and did I know that a plane had hit the World Trade Center? I told him no, and I'd see him in a bit.

What I assumed, not knowing the whole story at the time, was that the plane which struck the WTC was a small Cessna-type plane. That would have been a tragic accident of a mechanical malfunction or a grievous pilot error. So I had no idea that what Larry described was the first jetliner to hit or that by the time he made it in to work that a second plane was making contact. But when Larry turned on his radio straight away to continue monitoring the events, we all knew something bad was happening. This was probably about 9:15 or so.

Obviously we were all glued to the radio accounts of the news, but we did have work to get done. Some of my cohorts were wrapping up presentation drawings for a major addition to a local synagogue that was to be presented in a meeting to the congregation that evening. But later that morning we got a call from the design architect on the project who decided maybe meeting that night would not be a good idea. So we sort of twiddled our thumbs, anxiously wondering and perhaps waiting for another shoe to drop, particularly when we heard that the Pentagon was hit and there was another plane that had dropped out of contact over Ohio (this would be Flight 93.)

It seemed like an eternity until 5:30 when my workday was done. I figured I'd better stop for gas on the way back home and found that the gas priced at $1.10 or so when I went to work was now $1.80. Still, there were lines to get in the station. And all that was normal when the day began was now different. There were no ballgames on, nor any of the regular TV shows. All we had on was the wall-to-wall coverage of the mounting death toll and the question about why we were targeted.

In the days that followed, the questioning turned to mourning and then to solidarity. I remember all the members of Congress singing patriotically on the Capitol steps. For a few days afterward we weren't Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, we were just Americans.

But when I think about that day, I think more about the effect it had on my oldest stepdaughter. We all live some of our lives through our children and even though I wasn't around when she was born Dani is still my daughter. So perhaps the thing that upsets me the most is that this occurred during her senior year of high school. It's supposed to be one of the most fun years of a child's life, but hers forever has the black mark of being associated with 9/11.

There's one incident that typifies that melancholy feeling I get when 9/11 comes up. On the Saturday afterward, Dani's high school hosted a band concert with several other bands in the region. They all played 3 or 4 songs, essentially a typical halftime show.

As was traditional, her school's band closed the show. Instead of a regular show though, as I recall they marched onto the field and took their formation. Then, to the sound of a single drum keeping time they slowly and somberly marched off one by one. It's a bitter memory that I have, thinking about the joy that a high school marching band generally brings tempered by events beyond their control.

9/11 was an event that continues to define a generation. It was Dani's age group, those on the cusp between the tail end of Gen X and the first cohort of the Millennials, that volunteered to fight against the enemy who took the fight to us on that brilliant day turned dark, and it's those men and women who are now in their late 30s and early 40s who took most of the casualties in that fight on both sides. There were some who never came home, but most did after fighting a War on Terror that ostensibly centered on avenging what was done to us and countering the massive stock of weapons of mass destruction that we swore up and down Saddam Hussein had, but turned into a lengthy exercise in nation-building that we weren’t qualified to do and most of those enlistees really hadn’t signed up for. 9/11 became just another political football.

But for those of us who were just doing our jobs on a regular workday not unlike the thousand before, living through that one changed us too. We still take time to remember and mourn those for whom it was their last workday; the ones who never knew what hit them, those on the planes who never made it to their destinations, some who died trying to save their cohorts in the Twin Towers, and still others unfortunate enough to be at the top of the towers who faced a horrible choice of how to end their life until the Towers fell away.

Because of some agenda, political or otherwise, we rarely see the pictures anymore. But placing the events that happened on a Tuesday not unlike today six (now 22) years ago out of sight cannot and should not place them out of mind. We owe it to my daughter's generation not to forget.

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You know, now that we have lived through the scamdemic and seen the government reaction, it lends a bit of credence to the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, doesn’t it?

Regardless, there was a large segment of the population which, in the days immediately afterward, wanted to bomb the Middle East back to the Stone Age and make it a sea of glass. Instead, we built a military coalition and invaded Iraq because they supposedly had weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps they had some, but it didn’t turn out to be a quantity worth invading them over. One could argue that 9/11 was simply the Islamic world’s payback for Operation Desert Storm a decade earlier, which was our response to Iraq invading Kuwait. (Thirty years later, that Kuwaiti invasion was a little bit analoguous to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - and of course, we jumped right in there with both feet, virtue signaling that simple blue and yellow flag even though we don’t officially have boots on the ground.)

I remember reading in my history books that World War I was “the war to end all wars.” Unfortunately, that was only true for a couple decades before most of the players were at it again, and apparently the taste of it was sweet to someone because we haven’t gone long without sampling war again and again: Korea and Vietnam were battles to contain communism that, in the latter case, failed. Once we got through with Vietnam, though, we rebuilt our military based on a philosophy of “peace through strength” and it seemed to work for a time, eventually putting an end to the old Soviet Union and giving people hopeful talk about a “peace dividend” when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunited. That lasted about, oh, a year or so until we did Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait. A decade later we were back fighting in the same general area again in a vain attempt to shape the nations there to our liking.

Nor can military planners and defense contractors stand still, demanding more and improved weapons regardless of conditions. More importantly, it seems that we can’t keep our noses out of harm’s way for very long - having just incompetently backed out of Afghanistan after being there for two decades, there are many itching for us to involve ourselves even further in Ukraine as a means of regime change in Russia, subduing the Russian bear once and for all since our proxies can’t seem to do the job. News flash: that bear’s not going anywhere.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t defend our national interests. But in my opinion, we need to focus less on the Ukrainian conflict and think about the southern border conflict - an invasion of people who may not be simply seeking a better way of life as they are portrayed but the sort of bad actors who caused 9/11 in the first place. Apparently keeping the border secure doesn’t line the pockets of the right people, though.

So we lurch toward another 9/11 that may occur on 8/10, 10/12, or any other random date on the calendar. Our priorities are in the wrong place once again, and once again I fear innocent folks will pay the price.