9/11 - Eleven Years Ago

It’s a Tuesday, just as it was eleven years ago.  The sky, at least at 8:46 a.m., is the same amazing blue it was on September 11, 2001, though the temperature is chillier than it was then.  But this is a peaceful morning.  I no longer work in the building I worked in then.  In fact, I’m no longer employed at all.

The shock and the sorrow of that day and the following months have long since subsided.  But I haven’t forgotten.  Since I lost my job I had to cancel my cable TV subscription so I can no longer watch the September 11^th memorial documentaries, although perhaps I can find them on the Internet.

I need no electronic device to remember the photo on my boss’ computer screen, showing a plane sticking out of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  It was still shot.  Later, we’d learn it was no small plane but an enormous jetliner whose fire would take down the entire building.

I will never forget my co-worker and I trying to do our best to do our jobs while the rest of the office ran about in a frenzy, people looking for phones, for televisions, for more news of what happened, while our female coworkers sat at our community table weeping.

I watched the television coverage in our manager’s office as the second plane hit the South Tower and knew this was no accident.  All we could think of all those people; people just like us.  I remember the emptiness and disbelief as the last tower collapsed into dust.

We seem to be safer now.  Justice has been done unto Osama Bin Laden.  But we’re still waiting for justice to be done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and word in the National Security Community that Obama, whether he’s re-elected or not, will release the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rothman, who masterminded the Landmark Plots, and for whom some rumor, the 9/11 plot was engineered as a revenge for his imprisonment.  Rothman’s release will be Obama’s token of “good will” to the newly-

elected Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama was said to have issued a proclamation in honor of 9/11.  The man has no conscience.  This is the same man who castigates Wall Street brokers as evil, greedy millionaires; the same 2,700 people who were murdered in the World Trade Center.  The 9/11 terrorists thought the same thing about “evil millionaires.”  What’s more, while the replacement tower is still not built and its original name – The Freedom Tower – has been banished, a Muslim mosque and “community center” has been built in record time, in the remains of a building that was destroyed by the fuselage of one of the hijacked planes.

I remember watching the enormous cloud of smoke billowing from lower Manhattan as I stood on Alps Road in Wayne, N.J., thinking of all the lives lost.  I remember interviewing all the family members and witnesses for our magazine.  I remember my boss desperately trying to call his friend on the 104^th floor of one of the towers and later that day, talking about seeing his abandoned car at the train station.

I also remember in the ensuing days how we finally remembered we’re all Americans.  Eleven years later, many people have forgotten.  They’ve forgotten what it means to be an American.  They elected a president who is on record as saying he’d gladly throw out the Constitution, bows to foreign potentates, and never bothered (for his fine words about the military in his DNC acceptance speech about the military) to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Now-Known soldiers on Memorial Day.

He said he wants to transform America.  Thank you very much, but American was already “transformed” on September 11, 2001.  I know I was.  I was only two years into a job in which I was extremely happy from the first day to the last.  But every day since 9/11, something was gnawing at me.  Happy as I was (and I still miss all my co-workers), as each day went by, there was something else I needed to be doing.  Every day, I covertly read the news reports.  Things were going wrong and I wanted to be part of it.  I felt guilty.  I believe in doing the job for which you’re paid.

When I was laid off (it was finances not a job action), I wasn’t all that sorry.  I could do my part now.  Until I could find a paying job where I could follow my Conservative passion, I’d be free to educate myself on the subject matter of politics, work on my blog each day, and get ready to pass the GRE so I can get my Master’s Degree (probably in Library Science).

As for the victims of the 9/11 attacks eleven years, we have not forgotten you and never will.  God be with you.   And God bless America.