What Have We Learned from 9-11?

Eight years ago a close relative went to work at a company across the street from the Twin Towers site.  I walked over to meet him a few times those first months and found the experience riveting.  The smell, the pictures posted everywhere, the wooden sidewalks built so that people could get past the site.  

It has been a while already.  Those who lost family members or lived nearby still have to deal with the loss.  The rest of us are reminded  every moment when we watch TV, or check the news on our smart phone.  There is a hysterical preacher out there screaming about burning the Koran.  The media has lapped this up like he's Tiger Woods.  There are people going crazy because there is going to be a Muslim community center at the 9-11 site.  Don't these reactive types realize that the more they scream the more unsafe it is for us to fly?

Hardly anything we have done has made our lives and country safer.  Since that time we have been subjected to potentially dangerous  X-rays at airports, pat-downs, and TSA employees who act like drill sargents (and seem to enjoy it).  Ted Kennedy made it to a no fly list - so did my parents who are in their eighties and were going through the airport in wheelchairs (kind of sad for my Dad who fought in the horrendously bloody front in the Philippines during WWII). 

We have been in war mode every since the Twin Towers went down.  Unfortunately, we didn't notice much when 800,000+ Iraqis died during the U.S. invasion.  We kept out eyes closed about military deaths and suicides during the Bush Administration.  We sent our sons and daughters to do their patriotic duty(?) so that our corporations that make military equipment can have bigger profits.  I'm sure (and hope) there are good reasons (other than to feed Capitalism)  for our military presence in the Middle East.  

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Robert Fisk: Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt

Did 9/11 make us all mad? Our memorial to the innocents who died nine years ago has been a holocaust of fire and blood . . .

Saturday, 11 September 2010 - London Independent

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters...link

The Day After 9-11

Ever since my parents, in their eighties were searched and told they were on a terrorist watch list at the Houston Airport I have become very cynical about the idea of that the U.S. is really looking for terrorists. Especially after I found out that for the most part, trade cargo that goes into our ports is not searched.

Yes, 9-11 really happened. I remember a few minutes before 9 am, I am walking through the lobby of the campus library and my daughter calls me on the cell phone.. A plane just crashed into a building in New York... The next couple of days seemed surreal (I can imagine how it must have been for people in NY City).

That afternoon I went for a 3 mile walk with a friend and felt kind of disrespectful to be out exercising. The strangeness climaxed the next morning. I was driving somewhere about 8 am in my son's beat up Mazda (that had no left mirror or current inspection sticker) when out of nowhere a women and a school aged boy ran across the street right in front of me. It was not an intersection or a school zone. They just appeared. I think they were Latino and I don't think the mother spoke English. Anyway, thank goodness my reflexes (and the old car's brakes) were in top form. I stopped within inches of hitting them. For a split second I thought of the horrible horrible possibilities if I would have hit them, and was so thankful I didn't.

When I stopped, a woman in a new black Mercedes was about to make a hurried turn and hit my car. The damage to my son's car was minimal, but her Mercedes had one side really wrecked up. The woman was trim with short blonde hair. She was wearing hospital scrubs. She jumped out of her car and started screaming at the boy and his mother. F___ YOU! F__ You! She could be heard a block away. She continued to curse (but at least she wasn't screaming). She was late to work, she was upset about her car. Then she started crying as she told the those of us standing around that her husband was in New York and she had not heard from him since the day before. She was upset and angry that her patients were waiting. She was a anesthesiologist at large hospital in the Texas Medical Center. She says she was late for surgery. I thought to myself, thank goodness I'm not one of the patients.

An Officer arrived and he nicely asked me to sit in the front seat of his car... he talked to me for a while and gave me his phone number, saying to call him if I needed anything or had any questions. I know he did not ask her to sit in the car. Maybe he was scared to.

The child got to school and I'm sure his mother trembled as she went back home. I was embarrassed about being caught driving my son's old car, but the nice officer didn't give me a ticket for the sticker and I went on my way. I guess the anethesiologist went on to surgery.

Now that its been six years, I think of where our lives intersected. The immigrant woman with a young child, an American Latina who was embarrassed to drive a beat up car, and a blonde anethesiologist who screamed obscenities at people when she was afraid.