Reply #9 - September 11, 2008, 12:07:56 PM
I was on my way to work, listening to Don Imus on the radio. At that time, his part-time sports reporter was a NYC fixture name Warner Wolf. Wolf was off that Tuesday morning, but called the show to say that he had just seen a plane crash into the one of the towers. He could see the towers from his office. Warner didn't realize that it was an airliner. He thought that it had been a smaller plane. An accident.
I know exactly where I was on Rt. 295 when I heard that news.
I was still on my way to the office when they reported the second plane. I knew then that it was no accident. I also remember where I was on Haddonfield-Berlin Road when I heard that.
When I got to the office, people were going from their desks and radios to our breakroom (we were an emergency site, so we had cable in the breakroom).
I was listening to the radio when I started to hear rumors that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I quickly went to my bosses office. I knew that his son was working as a network engineer there. When I told him, he tried to call his son, but couldn't get through. He didn't manage to talk to his son until late that night.
I was watching in the breakroom when both buildings came down. My guess is that I was watching the same CNN reporter as Susie. I just heard him interviewed this morning. He was about a mile away from the site and really didn't know, right away, if the buildings had come down or if there was another explosion.
After that they sent us all home. I actually sat at my desk and cried for about 15 minutes before I left. It was my oldest child's second day of kindergarten. My three year old was just starting a new pre-school program and we had spent the previous nine months worried about him showing early signs of autisum. To top things off my wife was pregnant with our third child. We had several members of our family on active duty in the Navy, some serving overseas.
A few days later, my five year old son asked, "What's terrorism?" We had tried to leave him watching cartoons in the family room. We couldn't bring ourselves to watch anything but news in the rest of the house. Remember, NYC is only about 90 miles from us. Schwenksville and Washington are about a three hour car ride. My wife and I both spent a lot of time in both New York and Washington. So, I had to boil down terrorism to a five year old level and make him understand that no one was bombing his school or our family long before I was convinced that it was true.
That Friday, I was at CompUSA. The man behind me in line had a shopping cart full ot Ethernet cards. I mean 50 or 75 boxes. I said, "It looks like you have a busy weekend." I just assumed that he was a builder or even another store owner getting a deal from CompUSA. He told that he worked for the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. They were spending the weekend getting ready for about 150 brokers from New York to come and work in Philly.
BinLaden and others have a very skewed view of our country. They believed that bringing down the World Trade Center in New York would cripple our economy and break our backs. In the end, our businesses were up and running in a week (of course, many never shut down) and we started the chase within days. There is a lot of disagreement over how that chase has been run and what the results mean. Personally, I would have been happier to have seen binLaden's head on a pike several years ago. That hasn't worked out, but other things have and more will.
Every day, I thank God that I was born and raised in this country. I realize that most other countries have plenty to offer and that most who are born elsewhere feel the same way that I do. We have the freedom to disagree with our government and with each other. Every four years, we choose a new leader and power is turned over in peaceful and controled manner. We don't have military coups, we are not on our "Fifth Repuplic". We are not controled by the military or police, special or otherwise. Do we have problems? Yes. Will I be upset if certains factions in our government gain control? Yep. But, I will be able to live with it because I will not be thrown into a cell for my disagreement.
During August and early September, many of watched three event on TV very closely. We watched the Olympics and two U.S. party conventions. There were protestors arrested at both convensions. They were arrested, not their disagreement with our system of government, but for their form of protest. Breaking store windows and throwing urine and feces at the police will get you arrested no matter your reasons for doing so. The protesters who remained peaceful and did not disrupt the other protesters or the convensions were left alone to argue and support their point of view.
In China, we saw very few protesters. Why? Because they were rounded up before the camera crews arrived and either imprisoned or move to a safe (for the government) distance from Bejing. The form of their protest didn't matter. They were removed from any chance of public display and their voices where quieted.
Despite all of our problems, I am very happy to be living in this country and I believe that if the rest of the world was more like us, the world would have fewer problems. Like others, I refuse to believe that the U.S. is the cause of problems around the world. I believe that we are a force for good in the world and have been any time that we have been engaged internationally. Keep in mind that both the first and the second world wars began while the U.S. persued an isolationist forign policy.
Ed
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