September 11, 2001
Deborah Venable
09/11/06
Our
days started fast and early back then – 5 years ago, back in 2001. We were a very busy household. My husband had a long commute every day on
clogged main artery roads connecting major freeways in the East Bay of the San
Francisco Bay Area, so he had to be out of the house usually before 7
o’clock. I was an insomniac in those
days, unable to sleep more than a couple of stolen hours in the early evenings
and then up for the rest of the night and next day – swamped in paperwork and
technical work supporting two successful businesses we owned at the time. Our children still living at home were
getting ready for work or school. Everyone
had to leave between 7 and 7:30.
One
of the kids clicked on the t.v. as everyone was going about the morning rush,
and I had the news and talk radio station on at my desk. About the same time that it registered in my
brain that something drastic had just happened, I got the “Mom! Come here, quick!” from the tv room. The first tower was on fire and the pictures
of smoke billowing from it are permanently implanted in my memory. It wasn’t until later that I dug through
pictures taken almost thirty years earlier when we had visited New York and
found those we took of the newly completed (at that time) twin towers of the
World Trade Center. I’m sorry that not
all Americans had ever seen those towers up close and personal – and now they
never will.
As
the morning wore on and things got worse, the first decision I made was to keep
my children home from school that day.
I wasn’t alone – the classrooms were pretty bare as I recall. I hated to see my husband take off to work,
not knowing what would happen next, but he was already running late and he had
a class waiting. I cancelled some
appointments and hung out with the kids, glued to the radio and
television. As the pieces fell together
that America had just been attacked, using our own commercial aircraft and
innocent citizens to kill even more innocent citizens, the picture of what we
were up against was horrifying.
In
the days and weeks that followed, it was refreshing to see Americans unite like
I’d never seen before. The stores
temporarily ran out of flags of all sizes, but good old China stepped up to the
plate and quickly filled the orders. It
was also nice to see America’s usual hostile planetary neighbors put some of
their hostility aside to stand in sympathy with a mourning and crippled
nation.
It
wasn’t long before terrorism was a household word, bin Laden, was the enemy,
and Islamic fascism was hard at work devouring much of America’s hard won
liberties as everybody rushed to embrace “security first” – even at the price
of freedom.
Then
people started recalling the earlier attack on the World Trade Center. It was such an imposing target, after all –
those two gleaming towers standing above the rest of Manhattan as a symbol of
America’s vast wealth and a backdrop to the proud lady standing across the way
on Liberty Island. The first attack
fell short of the perpetrators’ goal, but it should have been taken a lot more
seriously than it was.
That
should be what we take away from the highly controversial “Path to 911” – ABC’s
new docudrama that aired Part I last night on television. Fast forward to the present. It is September 11th five years
later, and over a decade from that first attack. I watched Part I, surprisingly uninterrupted by commercials. I was glad to see that ABC didn’t back down
from showing it, but they did succumb to pressure to whittle on it. Like I said, Islamic fascism has devoured
some liberties. Political correctness
now overrules freedom of speech – even in the telling of a true story. The actions of liberal Democrats are, as we
say here in the South, in cahoots with Islamic fascists now. They want us to hate ourselves as much as
they do, and to do that we must not remember our history correctly.
If we couldn’t learn enough from that first attack on the towers to prevent the attack that took them down, can we at least learn enough from that to prevent the next target from falling? That is what we should be asking ourselves as we make our way through this painful anniversary and never, never forget how we first felt on that fateful morning 5 years ago.
Remember the “cahoots” part and go to the polls, whether you were planning to or not, on November 7th. We don’t need to hand power to the party in cahoots with the enemy to our freedom and our very lives. That would be insane and unconscionable.