Remember where you were when you found out?
I do, my roommate woke me up and had the TV turned on. The first tower had just been hit. The first word out of my mouth after watching the news I said under my breath was "bastards". My first thought was we were under attack. There's no such thing as "accidently" running into a 110 story building. I showered, got into my car and drove to work. I don't remember if I hit the usual traffic on the freeway. It seems to me that I was listening to the news on the radio the whole way down and really wasn't observing what was going on around me.
Getting to the office, that's all everyone was talking about. The news of the second tower getting hit was coming around so a group of us went to the gym that was downstairs to watch the TV in front of the treadmill. News of the plane that was hijacked and eventually crash into the ground in Pennsylvania was coming around as well as the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. We were hit, and hit hard. The enormity of the events hadn't really sunk in for me yet, but the dread and uncertainty that I felt that day I haven't felt since.
Eventually, we were all allowed to go home. It must have been around 10 am. I remember a friend of mine who is in the military calling me. She had just heard the news from the phone tree that put her and her unit on alert. She would eventually serve a year in Iraq and survive an IED attack and ambush on her convoy. Thankfully, she wasn't injured or captured.
So here we are, 6 years later. The "War on Terror" rages on, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, but mostly here. The debate in this country among the political classes isn't even about Al Qaida anymore. It's whether the "surge" is working or not. It's whether Congress should keep funding the military operations in Iraq. It's how much of our civil liberties have we given up in exchange for "safety".
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What's lost in all the chatter is how come after all this time, Bin Laden is still sending IM's to the world. Apparently $50 million isn't enough to have his head handed to us on a platter. Shouldn't we keep raising the bounty on his head a la Mel Gibson's character in "Ransom" til someone fedex's us his rotting head? I keep getting told we are the richest country in the world. Shouldn't his ransom be up to about a billion dollars by now? That's chump change to us.
I do, my roommate woke me up and had the TV turned on. The first tower had just been hit. The first word out of my mouth after watching the news I said under my breath was "bastards". My first thought was we were under attack. There's no such thing as "accidently" running into a 110 story building. I showered, got into my car and drove to work. I don't remember if I hit the usual traffic on the freeway. It seems to me that I was listening to the news on the radio the whole way down and really wasn't observing what was going on around me.
Getting to the office, that's all everyone was talking about. The news of the second tower getting hit was coming around so a group of us went to the gym that was downstairs to watch the TV in front of the treadmill. News of the plane that was hijacked and eventually crash into the ground in Pennsylvania was coming around as well as the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. We were hit, and hit hard. The enormity of the events hadn't really sunk in for me yet, but the dread and uncertainty that I felt that day I haven't felt since.
Eventually, we were all allowed to go home. It must have been around 10 am. I remember a friend of mine who is in the military calling me. She had just heard the news from the phone tree that put her and her unit on alert. She would eventually serve a year in Iraq and survive an IED attack and ambush on her convoy. Thankfully, she wasn't injured or captured.
So here we are, 6 years later. The "War on Terror" rages on, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, but mostly here. The debate in this country among the political classes isn't even about Al Qaida anymore. It's whether the "surge" is working or not. It's whether Congress should keep funding the military operations in Iraq. It's how much of our civil liberties have we given up in exchange for "safety".
--------------
What's lost in all the chatter is how come after all this time, Bin Laden is still sending IM's to the world. Apparently $50 million isn't enough to have his head handed to us on a platter. Shouldn't we keep raising the bounty on his head a la Mel Gibson's character in "Ransom" til someone fedex's us his rotting head? I keep getting told we are the richest country in the world. Shouldn't his ransom be up to about a billion dollars by now? That's chump change to us.
/rant
1 comment:
GIVEMEBACKMYSON!
/Gibson
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