Six Years Ago Right Now

by: nathanrudy

Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 08:25:51 AM EDT

( - promoted by Juan Melli)

Promoted from the diaries -- Juan

Six years ago right now I was on my way to work in Berkeley Heights at a semiconductor manufacturer. I was a PR guy then, and not too high up in the organization so I was one of the early ones in the office. As so many have said, it was a perfect September day with high bright blue skies.

An hour after I got to my cube someone came by and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Centers. I imagined a biplane, and went on with my work after a little concern over the pilot. Then I got a call from my boss to start putting together a message to employees because we had connections to the towers.

Eight years earlier I had been in HR at the same company when the truck bomb hit the WTC, and still I didn't get it. Except for people who wrote or read the August PDB, who the hell could have?

As I wrote it more and more people disappeared and went off to the break room to watch TV. Someone told me it had been a jetliner, but I still didn't get it. I finished the piece and tried to send it off to my boss, but the network was down. So I tried to call and the phones were jammed. I went online to see what I could learn, and the web was furiously slow.

Then someone told me about the second jet, and I got scared. A while later, after giving up on sending out the message or getting ahold of anyone outside our office, I went into the breakroom and the first tower fell. It was the first image I saw outside of a still shot or two I got to on the Web.

That's the last thing I clearly remember about that day, though there are snippets about Pennsylvania and the Pentagon and the fear. It changed me, but it changed the country a lot more. We became, for a time, a place where it was better to have our homes and lives infringed on than be threatened by terrorism. We became, for a time, a country where we would rather torture innocents than think about our own fear of mortality. We became, for a time, a fearful scared timid country that hid its shame by attacking people who had not attacked us.

Some of us fought back, arguing against the Patriot Act and the reduction in civil rights. Some of us supported the invasion of Afghanistan, but were aghast at the idea of attacking Iraq. We were ridiculed and abused and minimized and accused of being traitors for doing our patriotic, American duty.

And many of these people are here on Blue Jersey and other blogs. I didn't have a blog back then, but was writing a regular column for PoliticsNJ. I wrote this on September 18, 2001:

I do not think that we will back-slide, but we must be eternally vigilant that we do not give up the very rights that make us such a special country. It is a slippery slope, indeed, and giving up the smallest of liberties can cause us to lose the greatest. We need to ensure that the basic rights granted by the Bill of Rights are not eroded with good intentions.
It has already begun in small ways
Vice President Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft have already requested increased wire-tapping authority, more money for domestic spying and increased authority to detain and expel foreign nationals. These seem to be reasonable requests in the face of the attack last week, and the possibility of more attacks in the coming months and years.
But it is not prudent to start eroding our liberties from the inside at a time when our country is under attack from the outside. Cheney and Ashcroft are surely not suggesting these changes out of malice or ill-intent. Regardless, granting these requests would amount to handing the terrorists a piece of their goal - the lessening of America.

We didn't know that Cheney and Ashcroft did have malice for our country's freedoms, or that we would have to fight so hard for the soul of our country even while they screwed up fighting against the outside threat. But many of us kept up the fight, and in the long run we've been proven right.

Thanks to all of you who were there in the beginning, who spent countless hours away from jobs and family and fun upholding the belief that a free and open America is the best deterrent against terrorism. Thanks to all of you out there who spent the last seven years protecting the best of our country, even against incredible odds and abuse. Thanks to all of you out there who are still fighting, though we lost a lot of ground and have a long way to go to get back to where we were.

Keep up with Blue Jersey, write your own blogs, run for office, support other progressives for office, protest in the streets, etc. Never stop fighting, because we've seen what the bastards can do when the country is afraid.

nathanrudy :: Six Years Ago Right Now

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Six Years Ago Right Now | 4 comments

I want to remember (0.00 / 0)

the WTC when we didn't fear so much.

I took a photo in Sept of 1999 at Liberty State Park at a Festival. It was of the Twin Towers. I want to remember that moment again. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it. People were smiling, happy, dancing to the music.

We can get that feeling back again. We have to try.

One Vote. Yours. It really does matter.

by: carolh @ Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 11:09:29 AM CDT

A different view (0.00 / 0)

In 1993, my idiot supervisor leaned over my cube wall and told me that someone tried to blow up the WTC. Eight years later, he rushed in to tell me that a small plane had accidentally flown into the WTC. "Yeah, right. Accident my ass." was my first reaction. A few minutes later, he was back. A *second* plane had "sccidentally" flown into the other tower.
I just stared at him. Clearly, he and George Bush are wired for the same idiotic and illogical thought processes. Why the f$%^* couldn't he see we were under attack?
My morning internet problems suddenly made sense, as well as the mysterious crackle and signal loss from WNYC on my radio as I passed through Rocky Hill on the way to work earlier that morning.
The rest of the day was surreal. It seemed to pass in slow motion. The afternoon, so warm and beautiful, was silent. No planes on their flightpath over NJ. No constant buzzing drone in the air. It was something I couldn't remember ever experiencing before in my entire life- an planeless sky. As I sat there listening to the silence, I knew that things would never be the same. Not because we had finally seen terrorism fully formed and unleashed. I had almost expected that. It didn't seem to make sense that terrorists had avoided us just because we were bordered by oceans. I always thought it was just a matter of time and ingenuity. No, I knew that every child in America who had ever shouted, "This is America. We're number one and I can say whatever I like. You're not the boss of ME" had grown up to believe that we are the biggest bad asses in the world.
And now we would have a chance to prove it.
I watched the flags appear. I saw the hysterical fear on the faces of my conformity minded suburban neighbors. I saw the mob swayed to carry praise and blame too far. I chose something like a star to stay my mind on: this is my country and I will not let them make me afraid so they can take it away from me.

"Choose something like a star to stay your mind on- and be staid"

by: goldberry @ Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 11:12:42 AM CDT

Before (0.00 / 0)

http://www.flickr.co...

One Vote. Yours. It really does matter.

by: carolh @ Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 12:44:32 PM CDT

standing on top of the world (0.00 / 0)

In the Spring of 2001, I had to spend the day in the financial district, preparing to take a securities licensing exam a few days later for the new job for which I had recently been hired after I decided to get out of politics following the post-2000 election farce. Earlier that morning, I had taken the PATH train to the World Train Center and a subway down to an office building at the very tip of Manhattan.

Being in no rush to get home at the end of the day, I decided to walk the short distance back to the World Trade Center down one of the alleys that are far less crowded than Broadway. As I watched the Twin Towers loom larger and larger with every step, not unlike the view of the Death Star from the cockpit of the Milennium Falcon in Star Wars and having never in my thirty-plus years in the world had the opportunity to go up to the top, I decided that this day was going to be the day that I would stand on top of the world.

As anyone who has stood where I stood on that day can attest, the feeling was indescribable. The optimism which I viewed the world in that place and on that day, despite the fact that only months earlier, our own country's democratic process had ceased to function, was like nothing I had ever felt before.

Sadly, it only took a few months for those feelings of optimism to come crashing down with the events of 9/11. I was listening to the Imus in the Morning radio program when the announcement of the first plane came through. At first, I thought it was just a bad joke, then that it was an accident, invoilving a small plane. While I was on the phone with my sister, talking to her about the news, I heard the reports of a second plane from her radio. When news of the collapse of the towers reached my office, I began to feel like the end of the world was at hand.

Being the cynic that I was and still am, I anticipated much of what would ensue with the Bush Administration politicizing the events of 9/11 to take our country to war, not only in Afghanistan, but also Iraq and the renaissance that hyperpatriotism, nationalism, and xenophobia would experience in our country as our highways would become a sea ill-intentioned red, white, and blue.

As life in our country became exceedingly difficult, if not dangerous for its Arab and Muslim populations, I only wondered how long it would take for the other shoe to drop and Jews like myself with our unyielding commitment to the State of Israel and Zionism to be identified as the next enemy. Fortunately, that line of thinking has remained limited to date to the internet-based rantings of neo-Nazis on the far right, pseudo-academic claptrap about the power of the Israel Lobby from the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer on the far-left, and the former poet laureate of the State of New Jersey, who thought it was OK to promote a conspiracy theory about Jews who stayed home on 9/11.

But in addition to our country's conscious or unconscious resistance to a devolution into a Fourth Reich, like other tragic moments in human history, some good has followed. During the 2000 election, Ralph Nader claimed that the election of Bush was worth risking, because at worst, it would galvanize the left and make them a force once again.

However, I only believe that this was proven true, because of 9/11 and the Bush administration's actions that followed. Without them, a run-of-the-mill Republican administration, House, and Senate would have only inspired a run of the mill Democratic opposition, which most likely would not have included the phenomenons that were the Dean campaign, the establishment of grassroots progressive organizations, and progressive blogging.

That said, if I had to give up everything good that has been conceived from the events of the past six years-plus to reverse all of the damage that has been done during that time, I would do it in a nanosecond. I'd like to think that we all would.

by: rachael'sdad @ Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 21:39:19 PM CDT