One Sept 10th 2001 I was working at a military base, an old style open base where people came and went all the time. Except on this one day, there were guards at the gate checking cars as they went in. I had worked at this base for the past three years and never seen a guard before. The next day, 9/11, you couldn’t get into the place and they started putting barricades everywhere.
The Government had warning, there is no question of that. The question might be what more could they have done than post a few extra guards at military bases?
9/11 was the beginning of the end for The Great Presidency of George W. Bush. By sitting in that classroom and biting his lip he set his foot on the path to total failure as President. He became the Worst President Ever when he boldly marched us into a country that had nothing to do with the attacks for purely personal reasons. It has been funny to watch the Bush administration say they will strike out at any country that harbors terrorists and then complain when other countries do the exact same thing. It’s ok for American to act above the law, you need to play by the rules.
But there are no rules now. That was what 9/11 showed us. Anywhere, anytime. I tend to think if there had been another terrorist attack that Bush might have gotten away with becoming America’s First Dictator-he certainly had all the power that the United States Government could give him. But instead, he went on TV and told us to get our butts back into the malls and keep spending our money. He stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared victory-and if we had left Iraq at that moment, it would have been Victory. Now we may well never leave. Iraq joins Korea, Japan, Germany, and countless other spots around the world where the US has troops of one sort or another hanging around just in case.
The morning of the attack it was all shocking and horrible. The next year it was all shocking and horrible again. But each year that passes puts it a little farther back, a little closer to Gettysburg. A little close to Pompeii. Just one more horrible event in human history. We are all pretty much back to where we were before. Nothing has happened for all these years, nothing may ever happen again. Or there may be a new attack that creates another small blip in the history books.
9/11 is our Kennedy Assassination, we all remember where we were and what we were doing. We won’t forget. But like Armistice Day, the farther we move away, the less important it becomes-and eight million people died in WWI. Of course, we didn’t have full color video with commentary from a Morning Show for World War One.
I hope I never forget the horror of that day! I was working for Northwest Airlines, and was called to go on an Away Team because we thought one of our sister airline’s flights crashed into the Twin Towers. It turned out not to be so. But one month later myself and 10,000 other people lost our jobs. My life, as I knew it, was ended by that terrorism.
Your observations are correct. It is just like a wound that is healed by time. The horror, the fear, the heartaches, the regrets, they all go away with time. Just like the wound, at first it hurts so much but as time goes away, only the scar is left and sometimes it even leaves no mark and no more pain.