Thursday, September 11, 2008

Remembering

It’s odd. Seven years ago, I inexplicably found myself awake at five in the morning.

At the time, I was living a night-owl schedule; I was never up that early. Nothing psychic about it. I didn’t have any sense of dread. I was just irritatingly unable to sleep.

So I gave up, got up, sauntered over to the computer, logged in, and started my usual morning sweep of news. The first thing I saw was a flash from the AP: Plane crashes into World Trade Center. I thought of the time a bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building in the fog back in 1948, and turned on CNN.

The first thing I thought, as a scene of the towers from afar came up on the television, was Where’s the fog? then, uh, that’s way too much smoke.

But then the view changed to the face of the north tower, with the horrible diagonal wound where an airplane and steel beams met to annihilate one another, and that was the moment I knew it was no accident.

My brain went into overdrive. I’d done a report on the World Trade Center when I was in the fourth grade; I still remembered the tower faces were 208 feet wide. My mind raced: Bank was about thirty degrees; call horizontal span about 150 feet, divide by the square root of three, 1.75 near enough, about 85, double that, 170, that’s like a 767 oh crap oh crap oh crap, they need to ground everything NOW.

All this in about sixty seconds. I looked at my trusty computer for the time: “2001/09/11 (Tue) 5:55:55.” Convenient of it to give me an easy-to-remember time like that; I’ll never forget it.

As the minutes ticked by, I found myself getting angrier. First, there was a real danger that the tower could collapse. A plane with a lot of fuel on board would create hot-burning fires; it wouldn’t melt the steel, but it wouldn’t have to. The beauty of the WTC design, which I’d written about in Mrs. Yount’s fourth-grade class all those years ago, was that much of the load was distributed between the core and the wall, which were tied together by the floors. Breaking the outer columns would weaken the towers considerably; softening the steel in the floors would destabilize the walls, and when that happened, the whole thing would come down.

I began wondering how they were going to put out the fire. I couldn’t help but worry because someone who was already proving to be one of our dumbest Presidents ever was in office. (Note: I don’t begrudge the whole My Pet Goat brouhaha. The right thing to do in the face of spotty information was to have his aides get more information. No, at the time, I was thinking about what was to come. Only later, when it was discovered how negligent the Bush administration had been about the intelligence reports, did my fury at this administration crystallize.)

I saw the second plane coming in before any of the newspeople reacted, and had time to think oh crap THERE it is just before it hit the south tower.

Minutes went by. More confusion. Reports of scrambled fighters (about time!). The FAA started grounding flights (a bit LATE don’t you think?).

After that, I just watched, hoping that something would be done to forestall the inevitable. The Pentagon was hit. And then the south tower, hit much lower, went down.

The first words from CNN, when the south tower went, was “There seems to have been some kind of explosion,” and I found myself screaming at the screen, “That’s not an explosion, you idiots! That’s concrete dust! It’s gone!”

The wall of the Pentagon collapsed. A plane went down in Pennsylvania. The other tower went down.

It’s hard not to think back with anguish, and fury, and sadness. But even for those of us who thought he was a moron, who could have predicted that this administration’s failures in the months leading up to that horrible day, and in the months and years thereafter, would leave us still so vulnerable, and actually help promote terrorism in the world?

For a brief moment, the world was on our side; we had an opportunity to develop an international effort to halt terrorism in its tracks. But the administration utterly squandered that, and worse: The President and Vice President of this country chose to violate their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States—and for what? We are less safe, less secure, and less free than we were eight years ago. And they continue to scoff at the law, the Constitution, and the very ideals upon which this nation was founded—and give the terrorists more recruitment fodder than they ever had before.

We will be seeing the effects of this administration’s incompetence for decades to come.

What a depressing legacy, and a poor way to remember the people killed in the largest terrorist attack on American soil. Their memories deserve better than what this administration has forged. We deserve better.

Fifty-four days from now, we may get a more reasoned approach. If you care about the Constitution, if you care about the ideals upon which this country was founded, if you care about freedom, about responsibility, about effective government, about economic sanity, about ethics, about morals, about all the things that this country used to care about, please: a Democratic landslide is the only thing that will get the GOP to mend its ways and become the party that it once aspired to be.