Nine Eleven

Was it really eight years ago that I sat riveted to a TV screen that showed the World Trade Towers smoldering. They kept replaying a picture of an airplane flying into them. Peter Jennings (ABC) was so shaken he went back to smoking.
That would make him one more casualty of 9/11. Then there were reports of a plane hitting the Pentagon. Later we heard of a plane that went down in Pennsylvania. The President was flown from Florida where he’d been reading to a bunch of kids to somewhere in Missouri.
The Vice-President and a lot of other vital types were put somewhere underground. All planes were grounded. Military planes flew over the continental United States with orders to shoot. A kid in a small town West Michigan school asked me, “Are we all going to die?”
I told him the towers were 800 miles away and his tiny town was not a big enough target to warrant a bombing—not to worry. He wasn’t alone. My wife was due to begin a job that afternoon in a mall about twenty miles from that school. It closed after two hours that day. So did the big malls in Grand Rapids.
We went into national shock. As we consider trying people who tortured prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must remember the mood of the nation that day, the shock and fear—and the sense of urgency to find out who did this and where might they do it again.
Remember, after we were bombed at Pearl Harbor, we locked up all the Japanese-Americans in California, and nobody got tried for that. In fact we made the man who did it Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court and he wrote “Brown vs Board” later on.
The people that locked up the Japanese got away with it because a really big and threatening war broke out and lasted for years. The threat to our malls and buildings seemed to go away after 9/11. Nobody protested torture or imprisonment after 1942 or immediately after 2001. It might be a bit hypocritical of us to do it now..
It’s been eight years. They set off a few bombs in Madrid and London. A few hopelessly inept people were arrested here. We have to put our wallets and keys in baskets in order to get on a plane or into a county building. But nothing has gone boom here.
It’s been eight Years. Iraq has gotten boring. Afghanistan seems to be heating up, but it’s far away—except for the GIs on the ground there. The big story in this week’s “Newsweek” is: “Is Your Baby a Racist?”
Obama just had to fire his “Green Tzar” because the man says he thinks the United States Government blew up the towers. Movie actors are insisting we must have done it ourselves. Palestinians always thought so. If there is the remotest chance that Bush or Cheney did such a thing, then I would suggest the country is beyond salvaging. Hitler did burn the Reichstag himself, but he gained a lot by doing it. What did BUSH/CHENEY possibly gain? Convince me—with lots of facts.
It’s churlish of me, but I keep looking at pictures of the buildings and remembering how much we New Yorkers detested them when they were first designed and built. They were—and remained—ugly. It was a final act of hubris by Robert Moses--like “Rockefeller’s Folly” in downtown Albany.
Hubris built the towers. I remember thinking to myself as I watched them fall from here in Michigan—was it a kind of hubris that brought them down? In eight years I haven’t been able to formulate an answer.
Whatever brought them down, let’s not go off half-cocked and decide to punish those who tried to work fast—to prevent another attack—and were told, “Methods, constitutionality be hanged! Find them!”
Punish them and you might have to dig up the bones of some OSS assassins and burn them along side the 9/11 “villains”.
After all, WE told our agents to hurry up and find out.