9-11

The morning of 9-11-01 I was sorta groggy — I had been nursing several Smirnoff Ice’s the night before and writing out several pages of a story that just shot the shit — it was my first real great creative writing attempt in a while and I had the notion to continue writing on September 11th just for the sake of trying to accomplish something with written words.

I was woken up at sometime after 9 — maybe it was after 10 — by my mom who had a written message saying that the World Trade Center had been bombed and that there was a car bomb at the Pentagon. At first hearing this, I didn’t think of how bad it was — the US was overdue when it came to an attack on us with the discontent sentiment from certain parties around the globe. It was after my mom said that one of the towers were gone that I started to view how bad things were.

I got up, grudgingly and put on CNN to see what was going on and witnessed the most surreal image of my life — the south tower of the World Trade Center stood a smoking stick in the sky and the north tower was gone — clouds of rubble surrounded the south tower.

I got on-line, going back and forth with the TV and the computer – I started talking to friends and the few who were on-line and in the know (my friend, Matt Rogish) shared a sentiment with me of the anger, outrage and hurt — “This is war! This is war!” I know I alerted several to what happened while on here — that’s right, broke the news of 9-11 to people who were on the west coast or were closed-minded enough not to realize there was a world beyond them (that’s a story in itself I will bitch about in the future).

Things progressed and I had a sick sense of anxiousness — waiting for the next leg of this attack, and it didn”t come, thank God.

9-11 was a morning that shook me to the core and let me witness the best in Americans shortly after the attack occurred )the days and weeks that followed). Now? Two years later — I feel betrayed by my government and by those who exploit not only the terrible tragedy that was 9-11 but exploit patriotism and our fear of another 9-11 to get their own will pushed on the masses.

Make no mistake, I am for strong national security, I am for a lot of things that prevent another 9-11 style attack… But I am also very much against things like the Patriot Act which were just sitting on a shelf, waiting for a national tragedy in order to get passed through congress. I am also very much against the Office of Homeland Security, as I have stated in the past. This is a job for the Defense Department, and streamlining national defense to get the red ink and the bullshit that CAUSED 9-11 in the first place, cleared up, should take precedence over starting wars for oil or going on an offensive mission to seek out terrorism. You can only start going strong on offense after you have a strong defense. 9-11 proved our defense is shaky – at best. (thank you, Tony Dungy, for teaching this important lesson to me)

Do I fear another attack in the future? Yes. I’m not living in terror, but I will say that war is coming and it will be unlike anything the world has seen before…