Thoughts on September 11

Eight years ago today, I was working in Clearwater, Florida. I wasn't at the lab bench fifteen minutes when my supervisor, Steve, interrupted my morning coffee reverie with, "hey- it's nine-one-one today. Wonder what kind of emergency we'll have." It was that kind of workplace, and Steve had a dark sense of humor. Wouldn't you know, about half an hour later, one of the production guys came into the lab and said "y'all heard? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. It's on the radio." Steve and I looked at each other. "Huh, " I said. "What's the weather like there?" Steve said he thought it must be clear. A front had gone through and New York was having a bright, cool autumn day. It didn't make sense, but what do you do? You have to work and you can't be worrying about weird things like that. Maybe the pilot was drunk or had a heart attack. I was still operating under the assumption that the aircraft was a single-engine Cessna, or at worst a corporate jet. I turned on the radio to see what I could find out.

The broadcaster was talking about smoke pouring from the tower. Fire could be seen. Papers were fluttering across the sky. People stared upwards. Glass was falling into the streets. It had been a jet that crashed. A commercial passenger jet.

The newscaster then broke in to say that a second plane had hit. Just now a second aircraft, a passenger jet, flew into the second tower of the World Trade Center.

It was no accident. This was an intentional act. This was an attack.

The news went crazy. There were reports of missing planes. Orders to ground all aircraft were made by the FAA. Which aircraft in the air were under the command of hijackers? Which were inexplicably out of contact? A crash at the Pentagon. More panic. Reports of planes landing and accounted for. A reported incident at the White House. Where was United Flight 93? Reports of a crash in Pennsylvania. One of the Twin Towers collapsed. It fell. What do you mean 'it fell', I was thinking. How does that happen? A short time later, the second tower collapsed. The newscaster's voice cracked. He choked up relating it to us as he watched it happen.

I was stuck at work, wondering what was going on. There was no TV, only the two radios in the entire plant. The production guy who had been in the Army was pacing back and forth, dying to get home. When I did finally get home at about 5PM, I turned on the news. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was awful. Horrible.

People waving shirts from high up in the towers, beckoning for help. Firefighters and cops rushing into the towers. Smoke billowing across the Hudson. Papers and personal objects carried in the winds all across New York City, swept from office spaces where cubicles were broken and scattered and swept out of shattered windows. Disheveled and shocked people in office attire, some wounded, all frightened, covered in soot or gray dust, running as fast as their clothes or shoes or level of fitness would allow. Running away. Walking across the bridges in herds. Paramedics pouring bottled water over their faces, clearing the dust away. Palestinians and Iraqis celebrating in the streets, the shopkeepers giving away sweets. Londoners crying. Canadians and Israelis expressing sympathy and solidarity.

The jumpers. People forced to choose between burning to death in an inferno of jet fuel, or jumping to their deaths from one-hundred stories up. Only in morbid mind games does one ever contemplate having to make a decision like that. But today, some people had to make that decision for real. How does someone do that? Some tried to climb down the building's facade, and fell. Some tried to lower others to the ground with firehoses, or tried to be lowered. Some just jumped. A man and a woman joined hands and leaped into the sky.

Who were they? Were they having an office romance? Were they friends? Were they strangers, brought together by the simple fact of their humanity as they confronted death together? How does anyone make the decision to DO that? I asked this question over and over.

About five minutes into watching various newscasts, I found the presence of mind to get a videotape out and start recording what I was seeing. I knew that this was something that should not be forgotten. Certainly, the enormity and the horror and the outrage of it would prevent it from being so, but more than this, there was the real possibility of the events being diminished. People of this day seem to have shorter memories. History is viewed by too many people as irrelevant to them. Even worse, I knew that in the interest of partisan politics and political correctness, the horror would be smoothed over and the perpetrators would be apologized for. It would be important to see what was happening and be able to review it years later, unfiltered, un-spun and unrevised. The legislature was now seen gathered together at the Capitol. They were singing. For once in as long as I had been politically aware, the liberals were proudly singing America the Beautiful along with everyone else. How long would this unity last? When would the partisanship be taken up again?

Later into the evening came the night-time shots of small memorials put up in the city, built around any place that held large numbers of posted pictures of missing loved ones and flyers asking "Have You Seen..?" Close-ups of people's faces filled the screen as they were shown waiting nervously for word of a family member or friend that worked in or near the towers. Tear-streaks had plowed through the thin films of gray dust that still settled down on their faces.

The very next day, a special program was aired on the local PBS channel to inform the viewers about Islam. The program explained how Islam was a religion of peace. Jesus is an important prophet to the Muslims! Muslims had a beef with the Jews because Jews betrayed Mohammed during a battle in the 14th century, but Islam is a religion of peace. My boyfriend, having already read the Koran some time ago, was skeptical when I told him what PBS said. Another local station showed a report in which a Sikh man was being harrassed. His turban and beard confused the local yokels, who spit and cursed at him. Other local people were volunteering to go out and guard the area mosques against vandalism. People were unglued.

I taped another show about 9/11 after the news footage. The shots of people shown jumping and falling from the towers haunted me. They were forced to choose their manner of death, and no means was easy. I always think of those people, falling and tumbling past the windows. Are they aware? Are they passed-out? Has time slowed for them? Are their loved ones getting some terrible, certain sense of their deaths?

I thought of these falling people when, years later, Reverend Wright preached in a church attended by then-Senator Barack Obama a sermon about "chickens coming home to roost". When he felt it safer to speak his mind, fraudulent Amerind-impostor Ward Churchill called the people who worked in the WTC "little Eichmanns". I thought of them when John Murtha compared our troops to Nazis. I thought of them when Daniel Pearl was murdered, and when I heard the heart-wrenching screams of Nick Berg as the animals who believed in the 'religion of peace' cut his head from his body. Wright and Churchill and Murtha made me sick. The bloodthirsty adherents of "the religion of peace" made me sick and angry.

Eight years later, thanks to failure by the media to protect our interests and ineptitude on the part of the GOP, we are saddled with an administration that has a 9/10 mindset. We have had the Worldwide Obamapology Tours One and Two. President Obama has bowed to King Saud, said to "the Muslim world" that America "is not a Christian nation", and said that America is "the largest Muslim nation". He has hugged Hugo Chavez, ended aid to Honduras after Manuel Zelaya was deported (when he tried to become a Honduran dictator against the wishes of Hondurans and against the Honduran Constitution), snubbed the Iranian dissidents' pleas for help and stood by while they were slaughtered in the streets for demanding a fair election. Attorney General Eric Holder has exonerated two militant Black Panther Party members who had engaged in open, armed voter intimidation during the November '08 elections. The networks NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC and CNBC have shed all pretense of impartiality, and refuse to report anything negative about the Obama administration or positive about the new crop of dissenting Americans. Our national debt has quadrupled in eight months. Americans who are upset at the spending, the growth of government and the number of "czars" are called "teabaggers", "Nazis", "un-American" and "angry mobs" by their elected officials and the President of The United States.

Everything's coming to a head.

What I see coming is another attack. America is perceived as weak, led by a naive and inexperienced over-reacher who has no will to fight anyone except other Americans. The Muslims probably view him as an apostate, since Obama was an Indonesian citizen as a boy and was enrolled at a Muslim school. He probably recited the shahada countless times as a student. Kids don't care much about religion, or think about it, but adults do. Islamofacsists hate apostates. They hate Americans. Heck, they hate all Westerners. They hate weakness. Obama nails the Islamofascist hate-trifecta.

I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life, and I really hope I'm wrong about this. I hope I turn out to be a big, stupid jerk proven wrong about Obama and his policies and the path I think we're headed down. But I'm steeling myself up for being correct. It's eight years after America's heart was broken by people who hate us for our values and our foibles, and we haven't really acted like people who took a lesson to that broken heart. We're politically correct at the expense of security. The borders are wide open. Imams are allowed to preach hate in America. People in the President's administration preach hate. The ACLU prosecutes people who try to protect Americans. God and Christians are more vilified than the Islamists are. The lunatics are running the asylum.

This whole bit has been kind of a rant, and I'm sorry about that, more for my sloppiness than for your time spent if I may be so honest. I've read a lot of blogs today and a lot of comments on news and opinion websites. A lot of liberal Bush-haters and 9/11 "truthers" have been emboldened to come out of their spider-holes on this day and spew their disrespect, and it's been making me think of the jumpers' choices again. The images tug at my mind like the wind tugged their clothes, nagging.

Hard choices are coming, Americans. Think about what is important to you, and what you love. Think about the things that you don't need, and the things you absolutely cannot do without. Maybe the things are people. Think about and be ready to defend your values.

Think about who you are. Think about how your actions define you. Start thinking about what you're going to have to choose between when you get stuck between the infernos and the open skies.

Why So Pinchy?

My husband, Alan, gave me the pet name "Pinchy". ("Pinch" for short.) It vies with "Tantor" for frequency of use, though "Tantor" is used mainly when I am being prodded to move a little more quickly, as in "Unk, Tantor, unk." (For those deprived neglectarinos who never picked up and read any of the Edgar Rice Burroughs "Tarzan" novels, "Tantor" is the apes' word for "elephant", and "unk" means "go".) "Pinch" is the default nickname, used when I am needed to find things, spell out words Alan wants to type as he works on papers or lessons, and when I am asked a question or otherwise summoned. If I am called by my Christian name, I know that the household atmosphere is frosty due to squabbling or that there is an emergency . If Alan calls me "Pinch" everything is fine.


This pet name was inspired by a completely unfounded and inexplicably stubborn misconception on his part regarding a "crabby" quality I am often accused of exhibiting. It's preposterous, of course. I am nothing if not the epitome of bubbling charm and a reliable elicitor of delighted giggles from small children. Despite this, and despite the suitability of three perfectly-delightful pet names previously given to me by Alan over the decade he and I have been together, "Pinchy" is the one that has withstood the test of time and will likely be mine forever.

In the admittedly rare occasion when I actually am justifiably (and only ever moderately) "pinchy", Alan will tease me by forming his hands into crab claws and making pincher motions with them. He puts on an exaggerated crabby-face and says things like, "Oh! she's so pinchy! So very pinchy! We'll have to put rubber-bands on her pinchers!" The man knows no shame. It doesn't matter if we are in the privacy of our home or on public transportation, Alan feels at liberty to tease me out of a foul mood whenever one appears. If he's across the room from me and senses I'm irritated about something, I see the hands go up and make pinching motions. It's cute. It makes being crabby a lot more difficult to have someone doing that at you. This attitude of his is probably going to be a major factor in our long and happy marriage.

I will confess that I do have a problem with happiness. The problem is that I am not sufficiently happy often enough despite having every reason to be so. The causes of this condition may be varied, but the causes are not as important as the cure. I think the cure involves nothing more exotic than recognition of the problem, acknowledgement that not being happy often enough is a problem, and the active cultivation of a sense of gratitude for the things I have and the things I don't have.

Dennis Prager has written many wonderful books, and in my opinion the most important of these is "Happiness Is A Serious Problem". I won't list all the reasons I have for believing that everyone should read this book, but I will say it has helped me to think more seriously about the importance and role of happiness in our lives and how to cultivate it. I had to mindfully start breaking out of old patterns of thought and behavior. Happiness takes work; it isn't natural and it isn't easy, especially in a world that seems to be mired in madness and superficiality. But happiness is critically important, to ourselves and our own well-being naturally, but also to the well-being and happiness of those who love us. As Dennis Prager points out, "...(W)e have a moral obligation to those around us to be happy." Why a moral obligation? Because our expressions of happiness, or the lack thereof, affect others, especially those who love us. If I seem to be unhappy it affects my husband, because what he wants foremost is for me to be happy. He works hard and sacrifices his own needs and wants for his family's happiness. If the family isn't happy no matter what he does, what is all the sacrifice for?


I am not proficient at happiness, but I think I am better at it than I used to be. Alan has certainly helped a great deal. He is a cheerful and positive person without being saccharine or phony, and I know that he is always putting my wishes before his. It's a lot harder to be crabby when involved in a marriage with someone like Alan. When I do manage it, though, the bouts are shorter-lived and half-hearted. I will become predictably crabby at "worthwhile" things: selfishness, irresponsibility, dishonesty, injustice, ignorance and so on, whether they are others' shortcomings or mine, and it is not only reasonable but good civic-mindedness to be bothered by these things. The "small" stuff is not such an issue anymore, though, and that shows improvement.

So... I am working my way down through smaller and thinner rubber-bands for the pinchers as I accept my status as a recovering crab. I just pray for the courage to snap at the things I should, the serenity to side-step the things I shouldn't pinch at, and the wisdom to know the difference.