When the Wrong Man Does the Right Thing

Today, as I sat in the atrium eating my lunch, I looked out the window at the sunny sky with puffs of clouds marching eastward with the cold, spring wind.  My office is only about 20 miles from Ground Zero; they’d be having the same weather as we were.  As I watched Old Glory waving in the sunshine, I found myself thinking first not about Osama or Obama, or Lying Libs or Consternated Conservatives, but about the nearly 3,000 9/11 victims and the wreath the president would be laying at the center of Ground Zero.

Maybe it was the silence of the atrium at that moment (I took an early lunch because I had noontime call and a photo op afterwards) that made me think it’s not, or shouldn’t be about political campaigns or undeniably egotistical presidents.  The Media promised that all he would do is lay the wreath on the ground.  No speeches; only a meeting with some 9/11 families (but only a select group of 9/11 families, it’s rumored, who are favorable to Obama).

I don’t know whose idea the wreath-laying was, but it was a good idea.  I wish it could have been anyone but Obama laying the wreath.  I also recollected how opposed he and the Democrats were to the Guantanamo interrogations (actually they were done by the CIA in their own, unidentified prisons) and trials, how then Pres. Bush was banned by the Liberals from setting foot on Ground Zero at the subsequent 9/11 anniversaries, even though he was the President of the United States at the time, and how they blamed Pres. Bush, quite wrongly for the 9/11 attacks.

As the clouds sailed by, I remembered that cloudless morning nearly ten years ago.  I remembered the first picture I saw of the attack – the first plane ramming into the North Tower.  I remember the video, just replaying, of the second plane and of the fireball it created.  I remembered how I thought with horror of all those people on those floors and in those planes and what it must have been like for them.  I remembered the pictures of the people jumping out of the windows.  I remembered how my co-workers wept for the unknown workers in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon – just people.

I remembered my boss frantically trying to dial his friend in one of the Towers.  I remembered Mary coming in to say both towers were gone.  I remember seeing the television shot of the remaining tower standing abandoned in the dust and finally falling, it’s antenna tipping from side to side before righting itself.  I remembered seeing the pictures of the men who caused the calamity and how my hair stood on end just looking at them and how I thought I was going to be sick.

Two of the three are gone now.  With Osama’s death, a breath of peace seems to be passing overhead; the sky sighs with relief.  In a few days, the weather will be warm again (it’s been strangely cold here in the Northeast).  The flowers will resume blooming.  Justice has at long last been served, even if it was at the hands of the last man in the world we would have wanted to see take credit for it, a man who has time and again proven himself to be an enemy of America.

Thanks to our military and our intelligence agency, who were at last unshackled to do their job (probably out of political expediency of one kind or another), American can put 9/11 largely to rest.  There is still the trial of KSM to get through and the great likelihood that Osama’s mourners will try to avenge his death.  Even now, his followers are turning his last home into a shrine.  The Muslims can keep their Arab Spring.  Today, it is American Spring.