September 11, 2006
Many are posting retrospectives and memorials about the terrorist attack five years ago. I do not need to rehash what happened, but I may as well indicate how I feel about it all. I wrote the following two years ago, and it still applies to how I feel about 9/11.
A lot of blogs are remembering 9/11 today. I suppose I should do my part.
I awoke to a phone call on 9/11/01, a little after 6am. The gal on the phone was telling me that a jet plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I was still trying to wake up when I heard her exclamations on the phone as the second plane crashed into the south tower. It was an agonizing experience.
I watched a little of what I could find on the web. I didn't have cable service at home. At that point I had given up television for a couple years already. I wandered into work where I found out about the third crash at the Pentagon.
It was an eerie time. Internet news sites were slammed and very little information was available. The weird story of the fourth flight took hours to play out. Rumors flew fast and furious.
However, my most painful moment related to 9/11 was hearing, a lot later, the tape of the stewardess on the second plane talking on her cell phone as they went into the south tower.
I don't like reality shows where people get hurt. I'm too empathetic. I absolutely hated that tape. I didn't like watching video of people jumping from the towers.
Two and a half years later I got the 9/11 Commission Report from audible.com and listened to it on the drive to and from work. Even in two-hour-a-day chunks, parts of the report are hard to listen to. Recounting the story of people falling from the building and emergency workers dodging these people as they tried to escape the doomed buildings were particularly hard for me.
9/11 has been referred to as a day of reverence, or reflection, or anger, or other emotions. For me it is a reminder of the need for proactive, not reactive, measures to handle our own safety.
In real life I work on building software products. Proactive rather than reactive measures rule the day there as well. Even so, most of the engineers around me support Kerry/Edwards. It appalls me that to them the proactive measure of fighting an enemy before he can effectively deliver his blows is “aggression.”
To me it is getting inside the enemy's OODA loop.
This enemy declared war against us a long long time ago. It took nearly three thousand deaths for us to react.
Josh Poulson
Posted Monday, Sep 11 2006 06:36 AM
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