August 11, 2001...

[Hissyspit]

...was a Sunday.

It's been five years ago, today.

I stood with my girlfriend at the World Trade Center plaza and said to her, "I don't know why people think they won't try it again. They won't use truck bombs because it didn't work last time." We were visiting that drizzly overcast Sunday on vacation. She is from England and had never been to New York City before. The night before we had driven by the White House and Supreme Court building in D.C. on they way up there from North Carolina. I imagined the buildings falling, plane or rocket crashing into them - no 'failure of imagination' on my part. I ran my hand up and down along one of the columns. Young dancers were rehearsing on a stage in the plaza to a Stevie Wonder song from "Songs in the Key of Life." The music echoed between the buildings. We were looking to see a Broadway show but decided against it when we saw the lines at the TKTS location. She wouldn't go up the elevators to the observation deck because she said it made her nervous. I was on vacation.

It wasn't until several years later that I found out that George W. Bush, also on vacation, had received, just a few days (August 6) before our visit to the Twin Towers, a presidential briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It really was more than a "failure of imagination," wasn't it? And I know you all know how insipid was Condi Rice's 2002 comment: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," but realize how much, personally, the vomit rushed up into and burned my esophogus and how much I had to fight it back when I first heard it.

I was going to write a big essay post about this, but I just get too sad and angry. I don't want to be arrogant. I have nothing on the level of the feelings of the 9/11 victim family, including the "Jersey Girls." My feelings of "a-kinship" with John O'Neill, who DIED, are of no particular use to anyone but me. It wasn't until a year or two later that I broke down sobbing at the kitchen table thinking: "What good did all my critical-thinking skills do for any of those people?" I thought someone was in charge... This is a personal anniversary and I just felt I couldn't let it go by without saying anything. It's been five years. Two magazines - Time and Rolling Stone - this past month have had articles on their cover that use the word "HELL" as part of the titles to their Iraq invasion and occupation scam/situation in Baghdad updates.

It's been five years. This week two members of the congressional commission to investigate the events surrounding the day that fell exactly a month after our visit to lower Manhattan FINALLY got around to admitting (as Richard Clarke noted at the time) that the investigation was to a very great extent a political sham. This week the Bush Administration continued the implication that they and their ilk must stay in power this November because only they can protect the citizenry and this great republic from terrorist attacks...

What in HELL happened over these past five years?

(MODS: This is a post of personal experience, not a "9/11" post. Others, please do not turn this into a LIHOP/MIHOP debate. That is not what this post is about. It's been five years and I feel the need to signify the occasion in the forum in which I post most often before this day passes, as they all must do, into memory, record, enlightment and vagueness.)

EDITED TO ADD: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1888421

[NMDemDist2]

1. ...

:hug:

thanks for telling us about it.

some days are tougher than others to put up with the unbelievable crap that going on

[AX10]

2. I hate was has happened to this world since * became dictator.

[GrantDem]

3. K & R

This administration has left us all wondering what the HELL has happened. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences.

:pals:

[Gregorian]

4. Unbelievable. Absolutely incredible.

Hissy, your post is utterly amazing on several levels. Obviously, on your personal level. And I am truely sorry and saddened that on that level of caring that you have, you endured such disruption. But the other. The other one. That one where you analyzed the situation. Whatever it took. And it didn't take much more than your imagination. But regardless, it was real. And to juxtapose that against the president's briefing. It's just astonishing. Just as I said to someone today, when discussing Lou Dobb's comments, "they needed a New Pearl Harbor".

[Hissyspit]

5. Thanks, Gregorian.

The study of art and art history, which is what I teach, requires critical-thinking skills, but it also DEVELOPS critical-thinking skills. This is part of the importance of the LIBERAL arts. In the broadest sense, the consideration, awareness, analysis and exposure to them leads to understanding AND skepticism. They are freeing, which is what the term 'liberal' denotes originally. When I say 'what the hell happened?' I am in part, being rhetorical. I know and understand MUCH of what happened, intellectually. Emotionally, though, what has happened to this country and what we have done just knocks me for a loop and I have found myself disappointed in much of the academic response, at least initially in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.

[Hissyspit]

6. .

[Hissyspit]

7. Next Day kick