My 9/11

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No, i wasnt in New York or DC or Schwenksville and i didnt know anyone who was killed that day, so maybe i dont even have the right to write about it. But I will. You have been warned not to expect high drama or tragedy.

i dropped my daughter, aged 6, off at her Montessori school,at about 8:40 AM, and continued on down to my office, which was about 1.5 hrs commute. My car radio was tuned to KYW, a Philadelphia news radio station. Soooo….about 10 minutes later, i heard about the first plane. It seemed like a dream. and the reporter who described what was happening also sounded like she felt she must be dreaming. A plane hitting a building? i mean, yuh, it’s a tall building but planes, famously, travel much higher than any skyscraper…an accident, a terrible pilot error or mechanical failure? i drove on. Surely everything would be explained soon.

Then: the second plane.

And where was i when i heard about the Pentagon.. ?

I’m still driving. i called my BMD. he wasnt listening to the radio, so he kinda thought i must be crazy. I’m on the turnpike, i cant turn around, even if I wanted to …did i want to? did i still hope for some explanation other than the one pressing itself in on my consciousness?

i arrived at my office, on the verge of tears, met the eyes of my friends our secretaries and the tears spilled over. i dont remember how long i was at my desk. I dont think i was audibly sobbing. How long was it before my boss came in and said, ”Go home, if you want to.” i did. i hugged him and said, ”we will never be safe again”. Back on the turnpike with the news radio, the reports, later turning out erroneous, of more bombs. My daughter’s school had sent the children home, my BMD had picked my daughter up.

i cried for days every time i saw that awful image of the smoking skyscraper, so like the dire card The Tower in the Tarot deck, the worst card in the major arcana, symbol of terror, flight, rout, ruin.

Oh but our child! i remembered that the worst thing for me, a child during the Cold War and the bomb shelter craze, was seeing that our parents were scared. This was no bad dream, this was no imaginary monster the grownups could laugh away. My darling little girl, how could I shield her from our grief and fear? Now it was MY turn.

Well…I reckon we did okay with that. She doesnt seem traumatized by the memory of 9/11. At the time, she asked me for one of those Never Forget bumperstickers and pasted it up in her room, but she doesnt look back on the incident with the terror i can still feel when i think of the Cuban missile crisis. So, good. I think. It was worse for us than for her and her peers,and we have to be grateful for that.

But selfishly, now that she IS an adult, i wish she and her contemporaries could share my pain and anger about the disgrace and ignominy and agony our country is, completely gratuitously, suffering on this the 20th anniversary of that awful day.

They can’t They don’t. It’s the song of the generations, I reckon.

God comfort you my peers, and God bless and prosper our issue going forward..

Published by Hypatia

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63 thoughts on “My 9/11”

  2. Yes, I agree with Jac. All Americans have the right to grieve this tragedy particularly as it was avoidable.

    Former CIA Director George Tenet said so; I sat right in front of the podium from which he explained that bin Laden had been on the assassination list for 10 years. 9/11 was long in the making and the CIA in those days did their job. ObL couldn’t be found for years but finally was targeted with a five minute window. President Clinton refused to make a decision to take him out because he was on the golf course.

    I hold him accountable. My other source? The 9/11 Commission Report that was written by a bipartisan group of politicos.

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    1. Clinton didn’t want to make any decisions… period. He was a slave to the polls and his one and only priority was his political career.

      Former NSC advisor and SoS Condi Rice made a perfectly astute observation about politics:
      “Nobody gets any credit for being pro-active. You’re judged solely on how you react after the fact.”

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      2. This made me laugh Simon because my husband remarked just today that I look for problems before they happen. (Stock market discussion of course.)

        Liked by 2 people

      3. You don’t have to die on every hill Miss Liz.

        I once let my fastest Marine beat me in a platoon 3 mile run. He had earned the win in my mind and we were fixing to deploy so maybe good for morale too?

        Liked by 2 people

  4. 9/11 happened because the Deep State turned their attention to controling forever the internal levers of national wealth and power.

    Obama added mightily to this by creating thousands of senior level civilian federal positions. We are talking about general officer equivalent in power of position, very high paying jobs whose holders are all beholding to and idealogically aligned with Dear Leader.

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    2. Seriously, though. I know that most Americans love America very much. Most Americans are nothing like the strange people we encounter on sites like L1 and L2. But, Americans have not done a good job of putting their money where their mouths are. The fact that we were at war for 20 years, and most Americans were comfortable with allowing 1% of Americans to fight that war is very disturbing. I suspect that this is why Simon supports the draft. In a perfect world, we shouldn’t need the draft, but we don’t live in a perfect world.

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    2. Mmmmm….I don’t know about that. If that were always or even usually the case, I would be far more supportive of immigration. Most immigrants seem to vote dem, which is why dems want more of them. And many people overseas are incredibly hostile towards America. It does not surprise me at all that your gf is pro-American. She is your gf, after all 🙂 But I wonder if maybe you are being too hard on Americans in general, and too easy on non-Americans in general?

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      1. Not at all. Judy, we are getting the dregs and terrorists through illegal immigration. The rest come in via anchor babies.

        Think of a lot more people like Robin and my grandparents coming to America and no unvetted illegals.

        Liked by 2 people

      2. I hear you, and you definitely have far more experience with people from other countries than I do. Robin was definitely loved America more than most Americans do, and he appreciated what it means to be a citizen because for most of his life, he was a subject. He always said that he came to America because he wanted to be a citizen, not a subject.

        This is the thing that worries me, though: I worry that Robin was one of a kind, and I don’t think that is just my biased opinion. I was married to him for over 12 years, and even now I wonder where he came from: visiting Scotland provided no answers, because the people I encountered in Scotland were very different from Robin.

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      4. Lol 🙂 “We are all Scottish at the end of the day.” Robin used to say that.

        He also used to make dirty jokes whenever a woman would tell him that she had a little bit of Scottish in her (this happened all the time.) He made these jokes behind the backs of those women, of course, and in a good natured way 🙂

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      10. And I don’t know what the answer is. I am thinking strictly in terms of Scotland. You would think that people from Scotland would be great coming to America, and Robin definitely was, but Robin really was one of a kind. Robin wasn’t typical of anyone, anywhere. Scotland is one of the most far left countries in the world, and the more well educated they are, the more far left they are. Meaning, the types of Scottish people who could prove that they are capable of supporting themselves in America are extremely unlikely to vote with us.

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      13. And don’t even get me started on Ireland. All four of my grandparents came from Ireland, but Irish people today are politically insane. I don’t want them coming to America. Sorry, Irish people.

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      14. America cannot be America without immigration. I believe in immigration. My ancestors immigrated here, as did my husband. But America has always taken breaks from immigration, in order to give everyone a chance to adjust. I don’t want to end immigration forever. I just think it is time for us to take a break for a while.

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      16. Of course they won’t give up. And the State Dept is all in on helping them.

        Robin used to talk about an idea he called “Fortress America” He believed that, especially after 9/11, America was totally justified in shutting down all immigration. Being that he was an immigrant, there are those who would call him a hypocrite, but he was looking out for the best interests of America. The ruling class who have designed our current immigration system are clearly not looking out for the best interests of America.

        Liked by 2 people

      17. As Hypatia has pointed out we have exponentially more mosques now on 9/11. This is adult leadership from Washington, DC? The American sheeple do nothing.

        Point two per cent/ 00.20% (trigger pullers/ combat arms types) carried the so-called war on terror for one score years. No one noticed best as I could tell.

        Liked by 2 people

      18. My Dad was a WWII combat veteran, as you know, Simon. From the time he was 12 or 13 years old, he was arguing about politics with his father. My Dad spent his younger teenage years witnessing the rise of Hitler, and my Dad felt strongly that Hitler had to be stopped. My grandfather felt strongly that he hated England and did not want America getting involved. “Don’t fight the English’s wars for them, boy.” My grandfather repeated that like a mantra to my father for years.

        When he was old enough, my Dad enlisted to fight in WWII, very much against the wishes of his father. We aren’t raising boys to be men anymore.

        Liked by 2 people

      19. However wrong my Grandfather was on politics, he raised a great man. My grandfather encouraged his son to think about politics, to fight for what he believed in, and to protect what he loved. So many parents today are not raising their sons to think about anything, to fight for anything, or to protect anyone. They don’t seem to even want their sons to think about anything other than getting a good job, and it isn’t the kids’ fault.

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      20. I grew up listening to the adults argue, debate and/or talk about politics without ever getting violent. The Millenials just got mugged by reality. Few will learn the right lessons.

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      21. “The ruling class who have designed our current immigration system are clearly not looking out for the best interests of America.”

        That is the handy work of y’alls’s States and the “Li0n of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy.

        And yet another reason to give Maryland to the Yankees.

        Liked by 2 people

      25. Western Massachusetts is not the same as Boston. Not the same at all. Western Massachusetts is incredibly beautiful. Everything east of Worcester is God forsaken.

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      27. I don’t know the possessive plural form of any word. I never really learned the rules of grammar. This may show up in my writing? I was an avid reader as a child, and I learned grammar by basically copying and absorbing what I read. I never mastered the rules, but somehow I seemed to know them well enough to get by in school.

        On a wild guess, though, I am going to say that the possessive plural form of y’all is y’all. 🙂

        Liked by 2 people

      33. And the people in the east are weird 🙂 I once witnessed a woman from eastern Mass on L1 refer to a city just outside of Boston as Western Mass. LOL 🙂 We are smarter than that in Western Mass 🙂

        Liked by 2 people

      34. Nobody said that but we are the only country with both a generous welfare state and open borders – for now. This situation is untenable for the long haul. The sooner it breaks the better.

        Liked by 2 people

  7. At the early 1990s parties I was attending in New Jersey just beyond the grasp of New York the city, I was the sole taxpayer and non-illegal alien.
    Central Americans for the most part who never hesitated to go to the local hospital’s emergency room for a headache or hang nail.

    America is too woke to live.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. When you asked what the possessive plural form of y’all is, I stated, on a guess, that the possessive plural form of y’all is y’all. Was I correct about that? 🙂

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    2. I checked google, but there seems to be some dispute about this, and couldn’t quite figure out if they were even talking about what I was wondering about. I am confused 🙂

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  8. Yest another reason why female WASPs should not be voting.

    Y’all. Is southern slang. There is no right answer. Discussions like this one are what drive grammar NAZIs even further out of their gourds.

    Liked by 1 person

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  9. But to answer your question: I have heard it pronounced at least onced every damned which of way. Y’alls’es is probably the most common but y’all’s may be trendy with the Millennials.

    Class dismissed krap

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  10. Clinton says he was worried about 200-300 Afghans being collateral damage. The body count piling up around Hil and Bill makes me think it depends on whatever the meaning of is is that day.

    Remember Vince Foster!

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