I posted this one year ago, and I still can’t come up with better words to describe what September 11th means to me. Again, the words are not mine but they are eloquent:
Today is my mothers birthday, she turns 67. I love my mother very much, and hope and pray she has a wonderful day! It is a day that changed everything 2 years ago for all of us, but 9/11 will always be her birthday. A birthday should be celebrated, enjoyed, a day that we look forward too.
I remember September 11, 2001 like it was today, not yesterday not 2 years ago. I have not been the same, and can not get the images out of my minds eye! For the most part I am not an emotional person, I do not let most of life?s indignities get to me, but the events of September 11, 2001 have gotten to me and stay with me. The smallest image, the spoken words, the thought of those who died all seem to cause tears.
As they probably should!
Today, I display our flag proudly, I preach we should not and can not forget 9/11. I even got a tattoo to commemorate the day, and I wonder why it took such an awful event to make me appreciate the country we livein. Why did I take our freedoms, our liberties for granted?
All over our world people are remembering the day the world changed and I wonder if I have become a better person for it, or have I just become more aware of the gifts in my life. I do know I have not been as happy as I should be considering what I
have, my children, family, friends. I am conflicted! I want to do something, I just don?t know what to do. I want the pain to end, but I know this is something that just doesn?t go away! My family & friends are safe, they were not among the 3000 + people that perished 2 years ago. I can not imagine the pain and anger those who lost loved ones feel, but still I am angry and hurt!I do not want to make any kind of political statement, nor do I feel it is my place to judge anyones views on the state of affairs going on in the world today, but I find my views changing, my beliefs are strong and I want our country to take steps to stop those who would try to take away our freedoms, to prevent the events of 9/11 from happening again. It is those freedoms that give us the right to stand up and voice our views, popular or not! But I do feel strongly the need to support our troops doing a job I chose not too. If I knew then what I know now I believe I would have chosen a different path in life. Thank God for those men & woman who fight for our freedom and sacrifice so we can live in this great nation free!
I believe fear is a lack of faith and I am grateful to have faith. Faith in a higher power has gotten me through many situations that may have paralyzed me due to fear. I know those who lost there loved ones on that terrible day have gotten by one day at a time thanks to faith! I ask so many questions that I hope will be answered some day, but until then I keep the faith.
I am not sure why exactly I am writing this, but I do hope it will give me some peace. I have not spoken much about this, other then to express my anger, but I hope one or two of you that read this will understand and maybe help me let go. I do not want to forget, but I do want to be at peace with this horrible event in our lives.
Each time this anniversay comes around I find myself remembering what that day, and the days after it were like. The shock, the fear, the anger. In some ways, its amazing that we’ve gone five years now without another disaster like 9/11. Hopefully, we’ll be able to say the same thing on September 11, 2011.
9-11 five years later- In memory of Ken Marino
Just some images of that day. One is of Kenneth Marino, age 40. He was a NYC firefigther who died on 9-11. Ken is as close as TFM comes to knowing someone from that fateful day. See Ken and I shared a hobby and we both played in these tournaments ……
Happy Birthday to your mum
My Birthday is today as well.
These words are beautifully written
Geoff,
The words are not mine, but someone I knew a few years ago. He was far more eloquent than I
Happy Birthday though !
Geoff, you wrote:
“its amazing that we?ve gone five years now without another disaster like 9/11″
Geoff, WAKE UP! – sadly the people of London and Madrid do not share your view that there has not been another disaster like 9/11 since. You might also like to spare more than a moment’s thought for the victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami (300,000 dead) and the 2005 Pakistani earthquake (75,000 dead, 300,000 homeless).
Geoff, as Rick says so eloquently WAKE UP! Open your eyes and realise that there is a world out there that exists beyond the borders of the US. You also forget the man-made disasters that exist in Iraq and Afganistan as a result of the US led War on Terror. Countless people have lost there homes and thousands (if not millions) have lost their lives. The world isn’t a safer place now than it was five years ago.
One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying “We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]“. Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I’ve ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four “pilots” among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake “pilot” of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These “hijackers” somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn’t work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn’t work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won’t let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you “aren’t supposed to think about”. Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn’t respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn’t happen, not even close. Somehow these “hijackers” must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn’t have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were “supposed to see”. Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these “hijackers” wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn’t even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying “We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down” attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers’ magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be “Muslim hijackers” the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don’t laugh) one of their passports was “found” a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously “surviving” the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also “survived” the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be “indestructable” like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn’t bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastical far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the “nineteen hijackers” is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.