Atomictumor

Five years later, I still hesitate to say that I’m not really somebody who gets extremely freaked out on the 9/11 thing, and as such, don’t really say much about it. Yes, it was a huge, horrible, traumatic loss of life, and yes, it lead to some damn heavy stuff in the country (and abroad), but life for me personally hasn’t changed much. More expensive, maybe.

So, while I’m babbling about something that I have a lot of unformed thoughts on, here we go. Lemme tell my story first, because this inevitably becomes one of those “what were you doing when…” kind of things.

I was at work on that morning. I worked as a desk monkey doing second tier tech support for a DSL company in Oak Ridge. I had been there since 6, doing essentially administrative work for the morning (making sure people weren’t slacking, which I’m gifted at, while hiding my own considerable slackatude), when they asked me to do a ‘tech talk’, which basically means theres too many people doing nothing. So, I rounded everybody up and took them outside to have a smoke while we talked about any questions they might have. I had quit smoking myself a month ago, so I was thinking of myself as pretty selfless.

Yep.

Walked back in to about 17 emails from various people about a crash. The wild speculation all over. The guy sitting across from me was talking to an irate customer in Atlanta, when the customer saw the TV, mumbled something about her daughter being in there, and hung up.

Weird day. Made weirder by the rumors going around, that the Capitol had blown up, that the White House has been hit, that nukes were involved, that the Pentagon got hit, that Oak Ridge was closing the gates. Of course, all the information we got was second or third hand, because we couldn’t get to any web pages to find out what was going on. The folks at home watching TV had a lot more info than the technologically advanced hub of a call center.

I’m the type that tries to find humor in stressful situations, and to that end I had a screenshot for the longest time of CNN’s webpage, huge header saying that United flight so and so crashed into the tower, right below a nice big banner ad for “Rock Bottom Savings on United flights, now through November!”. Unfortunately, I didn’t take that screenshot with me with I left that job a year or two later, or I’d stick it here.
Finally I started hearing reports that Oak Ridge schools had been closed, so I told my boss I had to get my kid and split.
The place closed for the day about an hour later, I heard, which was significant in that it, like Waffle House, never closed.

On my way out, I drove by Y-12, and saw two white SUVs parked in front of the closed gate, with what appeared to be the biggest damn guns I ever saw poking out of the tail end. Lots of mean looking guys, also with guns, walking around the jeeps. I kept driving. This is no place for a long haired armchair radical like they guy I was in 2001. This is a time for John Wayne! For strong jawed, sparkle eyed men to swoop us up like the children we were and explain that its all going to be OK, to show us the world still works like it did yesterday, that we’ll get up in the morning with no smoke in the sky, no national uncertainty and depression, no mysteries.

I digress.
Got to the preschool for the then-3 yr old MastaG, and found that his teachers were watching the news. By then, one of the towers had fallen. He still remembers the building with the smoke to this day, and he says he was the only kid in class that watched it, with an understanding of what had happened. While I wasn’t so sure then, I’m glad he was watching it now, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because he has a story.

Finally, we made it home. We took off to GAC’s folks house, because it just felt weird being the three of us in the face of something like this (four, if you count that she was a month pregnant with Pigpen). Got some Steak and Shake. Watched the sky, empty of planes, surreal. I recall hearing that the mean temperature dropped some 3 degrees because of that.

More speculation. Terrorists? From where? Bin Laden’s name came up quickly, both on the couch and on the news.

—

Five years later on a quest to free the Middle East, where did this get him? Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. Escalation of violence in Palestine and Israel. Thousands and thousands of deaths. More militarization around the world. More western boots in the Middle East than ever.

Journalists, aid workers, children, taboo targets in previous wars, now in as much danger as soldiers, if not more. Any rules of combat, designed to maintain civilization in war zones, are out the window. Iraq run by thugs, death squads who’ll give a family hours to leave the neighborhood or die. More credence than ever given to Saudi Arabia and Pakistani ruling thugs, just because they’re not in our way. Maybe if we shake hands with one devil, we’ll be able to smite another.
I have a hard time thinking that he didn’t see this inevitability when he committed mass murder out of nowhere. Is he crazy? Is he one of these endtime wierdos, thinking that its his duty to bring on apocaplyse for the good of whatever silly diety? We have some of those on our soil, too, and they’re all pretty freaky.

Sun Tzu said “Know thy enemy and know thyself”, and thats something I’ve always subscribed to. I think that differentiates me in a lot of ways from some people, because I have a hard time sticking to the ‘patriot’, ‘with us or against us’ way of thought. Fact is, these people kill westerners (and Americans) because they hate us. They hate us because our foreign policy has given their leaders the opportunity to raise these people from crib to now in an atmosphere where America is evil, and is determined to take something from them. The only time most of these people have seen that stars and stripes was on the business end of a bomb in Libya, or Lebanon, or Iraq.

Nothing changed on 9/11 for them. These people wanted to kill us this much back in the 80s.  I remember digging into my ‘Weekly Reader’ back in the 4th grade and reading about Muammar al-Gaddafi saying something to the extent of “The rivers will run red with the blood of Americans”.

As a fourth grader, hearing the leader of a nation say something about my blood like that is an eye opener.

The only difference for us is that they slipped through the defenses on 9/11.
They’ll probably do it again. If not them, it’ll be another home grown terrorist. The means of easy mass murder is legion if a mind is twisted to that kind of thinking.

Anyway, as wierd as it is, I’m almost loathe to post this (partially because it doesn’t deal at all with what affected me personally the most about this, which is the budding start of fascism in American politics).

I don’t normally get into this kinda stuff on the ‘tumor, but today’s an appropriate day for it.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 7:25 am and is filed under Fearmongering, Pain, Rambling, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.