Don't think I've forgotten that morning
I remember it well. There was a kitten climbing my wool army surplus coat hanging from the clothesrack pushed up on the wall. A new kitten my now-wife and I had adopted the day before. We were getting ready for working, though, at the time neither of us really had jobs worth bragging about. It was a post-shower time with wet hair and CNN on the tv perched on the dresser. We had a four walled room to call ours in the shared apartment. Aaron Brown was going on about some tragedy. A plane, a fucking plane had just crashed into one of the towers of the world trade center. What bad luck. Now-wife and I said things like, "That's a bad morning," and "Oh my god," but in the way you would passing a really bad car accident. How does that happen? With all the avionics and autopilots and whirly-gigs in those planes, you can't hardly crash them. Except they do, from time to time, crash. And that's a tragedy. And that's what Aaron Brown was talking about on the tv when a fireball came shooting out the side of the other tower, the one not hit by the first plane. Then we all knew. We knew it wasn't an accident. It wasn't a tragedy, it was a travesty. It was an affront to each and everyone living in this world and it was no longer something that happened (unfortunately) to someone else, it just happened more to them than us. But it was purposeful and cruel and meditated and funded and planned and hashed and practiced and then there was the Pentagon and then there was a field in Pennsylvania and my god where the fuck are they going to try and drop one next?
Don't think I've forgotten that day. But what I like to remember about that day is the story of the passengers on flight 93, the last plane to go down. They knew they were headed for death and yet they looked terror in the eye and said 'no.' They rushed the cockpit and forced the plane to abort it's final target. They all lost their lives standing up for something larger than themselves. We owe it to them, and to their memory to live lives without fear, without the pernicious effects of terror.
