matrixrefugee (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
matrixrefugee) wrote2004-09-11 11:28 pm
matrixrefugee) wrote2004-09-11 11:28 pm
Entry tags:
9-11: Remember....
This is an entry I posted on my old Diaryland diary last year, but I thought I would post it here.
+J.M.J.+
"Just an Ordinary Day...Of Irony"
By Renee C.H. Mulhare
09/11/2001...
It started out as an ordinary Tuesday morning, with the usual Tuesday morning routine. I got up at 8:30 a.m. to catch the 9:30 bus to Lowell for my weekly appointment with my therapist. I got dressed (relaxed-cut jeans & a Star Wars tee shirt -- I'm a sci-fi nut), took my vitamins and my antihistimine (bad nasal allergies), washed my face, combed my hair (ear-length dark brown; makes me look a little like Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity in "The Matrix"). At 8:45, I remember banging my bare foot on the runner of the rocking chair in my room and hit one of the pressure points in it, sending a needle of pain up my spine to my brain stem, which nearly made me pass out. But I got my shoes on and hobbled downstairs with my purse and my totebag of stuff I'd packed the night before: notebooks, file folder, computer disks, September issue of "Magnificat" magazine (I'm Catholic),...and a copy of the late Father Vincent Miceli's book "The Roots of Violence". I had breakfast and uncovered my jittery little grey cockatiel Oskar-Maximilian, known as "Ozzie-Max" or just "Oz".
I said goodbye to my mom about 9:20, then I ran upstairs to get my watch, which I'd forgotten and my clip-on sunglasses (I wear regular glasses). Then I left the house and walked to the bus stop around the corner and down the street from my house.
Very few cars passed by the stop that day. The sun shone bright from a clear, clear sky, which shown with that same lapis lazuli blue as the sky in a Maxfield Parrish painting. I stood there, waiting for the bus to arrive, wondering why it was so quiet. Traffic generally clogs our suburban streets right about that time, but it usually has started to die down. I guessed it had died down earlier than usual.
I had a funny feeling, but I figured the banged pressure point had something to do with it.
The bus came about 9:40, which is somewhat early, but not unusual. I got on, paid my fare, but then I noticed the regulars' usual jabbering showed more animation than ordinary.
"A plane hit the World Trade Center towers!" "Oh, Saddam Hussein did it!" "No, Qaddaffi did it!" Yapyapyap. "Oh we gotta bomb this country!" "And we gotta bomb Iraq." "And Libya!" "And the other country!" "And Ruritania! Ruritania attacked us!" "Bombbombbombbomb!" Innocently I asked, "What's going on?" "What?! Haven't you heard?!? Terroists just crashed into the WTC Towers!" The noisiest of all was this one woman who frequently complained at how badly managed EVERYTHING was, so of course she was describing how things should have been done so this wouldn't have happened. (It's a good thing some people end up as housewives living on welfare and child support; if they ended up as Secretary of Defense, the nastier powers that be would have reason to hate us for being more trigger-happy than they are, or than we are now.
So to this I said, "Okay, some rookie pilot got confused when he was stacking into or out of LaGuardia. Big deal." Inwardly, I added 'Could any of us done any better or worse?' "Nonono, you don't get it!! We're being attacked! We gotta defend ourselves." I'm not a pacificist by any stretch of the imagination. I'm an Irish woman warrior who likes action flicks (but only when they have enough artistry or philosophy to balance them out). But, in the name of charity, I said, "We can't just go dropping bombs indiscriminately until we've found out who did this. We can't just reduce some innocent nation to a radioactive crater." The chief yapper piped in, "Well, would you want them to reduce US to a radioactive crater?!" I merely looked at her with mingled contempt and pity, and retreated behind "The Roots of Violence" (Ho, ho, ho.). I just so happened to be reading the chapter on Muslim extremists.
The bus driver had the radio on. The report came that the second tower got hit. The warmongers started gloating that they were right. In shock, I listened with ears dull to everything but the background jabbering, which sounded only like so many monkeys in the zoo. I got off at the CyberCafe of a community college in Lowell, intending to check my e-mail.
Wally the tech had the TV on. It took me forever to check my messages, since the Internet... was... JAMMED!!! The CC has ISDN connections, but the download time went slower than the 56K modem on my home computer. In between waiting for pages to load, I ended up overhearing the reports on the TV. I heard about the South Tower collapsing....And then I heard about a plane going down in D.C. They didn't say where in D.C., but my blood ran cold.
At the time, I was e-mailing with a young man I'd met through a Catholic singles site. He lived and worked in D.C. on the Presidential Economics Committee. As soon as that report came in, my blood turned to water in my veins. Ice water. I printed out a few messages and went out. It was almost time for my appointment anyway. Better early than never.
I had only about a half-mile walk to my therapist's office, but it felt like three miles. My mind started racing in all the wrong directions at that point. I had visions of Brian getting killed....or if he survived, we'd end up going to war and there'd be another draft and he'd get selected...I feared that the talk I'd heard about women getting drafted might come true. I'm willing to defend myself, but not against a foreign country. I don't want to get shipped like a commodity good to another land I've never seen and be forced to shoot at strangers, young people who, of themselves, are no better and no worse than I am. It's not that I'm unpatriotic; I just know I'm a very sensitive person and sending me into combat would just destroy me as a person. Plus, I have oversensitive hearing: loud noises just about drive me insane, so put me in combat and you have instant shellshock. I'd end up like one of those mentally demolished VietNam veterans you see living on the streets in Boston.
By a miracle, I crawled into the outer door of the office and just about collapsed on the floor. My therapist was right there, waiting for me. I lost it at that point. I think I screamed at the office workers who had the radio on; I said something like "Shut that [censored] thing off!!" I'd heard enough. But my therapist got me into her office without further incident and got me seated. I really lost it at that point: I think I started wailing. Somehow she calmed me down. I didn't feel better, but I didn't have to yell my lungs out.
Later, after the appointment, I returned to the CyberCafe, but I found it closed. The college campus had become a ghost town, parking lot empty, no sign of activity. I headed downtown. On the sidewalk, I passed by three dark kids, probably Hispanics, hangin' around, waiting for a ride. One of them said out loud, "We're always havin' trouble with them A-rabs." Another one, looking right at me as I passed by, said, "There goes one now." Now honestly. I'm a pale-skinned Caucasian with features that are alternately called French or Irish, depending on the viewer's ethnic background. I've done a little bit of anthropology, and I KNOW I don't look Arabic. I don't even dress in such a way that I could be mistaken for a Muslim woman. Yes, I wear long dresses and sometimes when I'm going to church, I might wear a black veil wound around my head, but I never wind it across my face! With my allergies, it might be too suffocating. And, for that matter, how would the veil fit under my glasses? (Yes, I'm speaking theoretically.)
I decided to go to the Lowell Library as I had business there. I ended up just dropping off my books: they too had closed.
I had banking to do, but decided to wait. They'd probably closed too. Even the Barnes and Noble bookstore had closed.
I went into St. Joseph the Worker's Shrine. Usually a good-sized crowd shows up for Mass, but today, it was packed to capacity and people were sitting on the chair-height heating units under the windows. I ended up sitting on the floor in the back. I went to light a candle before St. Joseph's statue, but all the candles were lit. For that matter, every candle before every statue had been lit.
I think I cried. Everyone cried that day, except the people too crass to care, and there are people like that. I cried enough to make up for their apathy.
When I came home, my mother met me at the door and hugged me. We held each other for a long, long time, both of us still crying. She'd seen the early coverage when she'd turned on the television shortly after I'd left, to watch the televised Mass. After that, she went about her own usual Tuesday morning routine, taking a walk around town to do some errands.
We lived just a few towns over from an airstrip, so we were accustomed to hearing aircraft of all kinds going over the house throughout the day, but we didn't hear a single plane or helicopter fly overhead. The stillness only added to the general feeling of gloom, Except at lunch, when we heard something small, probably a Cessna, pass over. But then we heard something bigger, like a fighter jet, swoop in and circle around. We would later hear from a friend in town that all civilian aircraft had been grounded for the day, but apparantly someone hadn't heard the order.
One thing that day helped me return to a sense of normalcy: helping my mother babysit the then 6-year old daughter of my dad's friend Norman. Usually she was a rather bouncy kid, but today even she was subdued. Still, we avoided talking about what had happened, we couldn't worry her.
My dad heard the news on the radio while he was watering plants in the greenhouse where he works, and his initial reaction was similar to mine. But then he when up to the farm stand connected with the greenhouse, for a coffee break, and he heard about the second plane hitting the second tower.
I remember watching the news coverage with my dad that evening and night. I don't remember if it was that night or what night it was when the news aired the footage taken by two Frenchmen, brothers, who had been in New York City making a documentary. But the image and the sounds, of the plane passing overhead, a black shadow swooping low against the buildings, then hitting the first tower with a soul-rending *BOOM*, will be burned into my memory for as long. They didn't air it that way, but my mind captured it in a nightmarish slow motion, as if that could somehow stop the impact. I still get sick to my stomach when these images replay through my mind, even to this day.
Next day, I returned to work at my night job, in a grocery store bakery, to find the store quiet. Very few people came in to order bread or pasteries. Not many people came in to shop much at all. The few that did came to buy necessities, bread and milk and eggs and such. My co-workers and I realized why: everyone was home watching the news coverage. In the days that followed, we ended up having a shortage of bagels and some of the breads: the dough came in as frozen proof, but our shipments had been stalled since the planes carrying them were grounded in Canada.
But we had no shortage of patriotic items. Our cake decorators started decorating cakes and large sugar cookies with red white and blue streamers, flag designs, or just stars and stripes. We could barely keep the display case stocked with flag cookies! On Friday, I heard from the ladies who worked in the craft department at a nearby Wal-Mart that they sold every swatch of red, white and blue ribbons and every flag kit they had, in just three days.
Friday night I had to work, but afterward, my dad took me to an inpromptu candelight vigil on the town common. We stood there holding candles and waving to the cars passing by and honking their horns in acknowlegement. I was holding up my free hand in a "V" salute, commonly mistaken for a peace symbol, but Winston Churchill, the PM of England during World War II, introduced it as the "Victory" salute. A few police cars and fire trucks passed by, off duty; we started cheering as they passed and they "blipped" their sirens in reply. I've always had respect for policemen and firefighters, but after 9-11, and hearing about the dozens of personnel who lost their lives when the Towers came down, my respect has doubled. Ordinary heroes, putting their lives on the edge for others. It takes guts to do that kind of work, and I admire them for it.
The tragedy came close to home when we heard at our parish, St. Francis in Dracut, Mass. about a funeral service for John Oganowski, the airline pilot aboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. My dad knew someone who had bought a tractor from this man, who rented out plots of land on his family's farm at small annual fees to Asian people in his community so they could grow vegetables and soybeans. Finding this out only made the tragedy seem even more real, that this was not some nightmare we would just wake up from.
In the middle of all this, my dad got to thinking about all the many symbols of our country, including the Statue of Liberty. He'd always wanted to see her up close, so he and I decided we'd drive down to New York City the following summer to see Lady Liberty.
The following July, 2002, we drove down one day; the following afternoon, we took the ferry to Liberty Island, and afterwards, when we came back to Manhatten, we walked up to Ground Zero. Most of the site had been cleared by then, but the clean up crews were still hard at work. We were lucky enough to get a good view from the observation deck.
Ground Zero has to be the most desolate site/sight I have ever seen. Rubble. Bits of steel and glass strew the ground. It's so big that the excavators at work in the middle of the two deep holes where the towers stood looked toy-sized. The wounds I carried from that terrible day reopened as I stood there, but somehow it was what we needed to do. It's a place that every American should visit once in their lifetime, to contemplate this terrible event, at least to keep from growing too comfortable. I think, as horrible as this tragedy is, we needed something like it to happen, to jolt us out of our little cozy-corners. It's a shame that it takes terrible things like this to get us to wake up to our own complacency, but it's like they say, if you're gonna make an omlet, you have to crack some eggs first.
At the one year anniversary, I went into Lowell again, this time to pray and remember. The atmosphere was different: the military had gone into Afghanistan in an effort to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and his minions. We still haven't found him yet, but there again, it took the Allies almost twenty years to finally track down Adolf Eichmann, the man largely responsible for the Holocaust. The sky was clear early that morning, as clear as it had been that morning one year before, but as if nature were mourning with us, by midafternoon, clouds moved in, hiding the sun and a cold wind kicked up, coming due north, as if to symbolise the winds of war that would be sweeping across our world as we would later move in on Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden's chief ally.
We still have a long road ahead of us. Perhaps we will never be quite free of the suffering this event has caused. But if we use this suffering to strengthen ourselves, it will not be in vain.
+J.M.J.+
"Just an Ordinary Day...Of Irony"
By Renee C.H. Mulhare
09/11/2001...
It started out as an ordinary Tuesday morning, with the usual Tuesday morning routine. I got up at 8:30 a.m. to catch the 9:30 bus to Lowell for my weekly appointment with my therapist. I got dressed (relaxed-cut jeans & a Star Wars tee shirt -- I'm a sci-fi nut), took my vitamins and my antihistimine (bad nasal allergies), washed my face, combed my hair (ear-length dark brown; makes me look a little like Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity in "The Matrix"). At 8:45, I remember banging my bare foot on the runner of the rocking chair in my room and hit one of the pressure points in it, sending a needle of pain up my spine to my brain stem, which nearly made me pass out. But I got my shoes on and hobbled downstairs with my purse and my totebag of stuff I'd packed the night before: notebooks, file folder, computer disks, September issue of "Magnificat" magazine (I'm Catholic),...and a copy of the late Father Vincent Miceli's book "The Roots of Violence". I had breakfast and uncovered my jittery little grey cockatiel Oskar-Maximilian, known as "Ozzie-Max" or just "Oz".
I said goodbye to my mom about 9:20, then I ran upstairs to get my watch, which I'd forgotten and my clip-on sunglasses (I wear regular glasses). Then I left the house and walked to the bus stop around the corner and down the street from my house.
Very few cars passed by the stop that day. The sun shone bright from a clear, clear sky, which shown with that same lapis lazuli blue as the sky in a Maxfield Parrish painting. I stood there, waiting for the bus to arrive, wondering why it was so quiet. Traffic generally clogs our suburban streets right about that time, but it usually has started to die down. I guessed it had died down earlier than usual.
I had a funny feeling, but I figured the banged pressure point had something to do with it.
The bus came about 9:40, which is somewhat early, but not unusual. I got on, paid my fare, but then I noticed the regulars' usual jabbering showed more animation than ordinary.
"A plane hit the World Trade Center towers!" "Oh, Saddam Hussein did it!" "No, Qaddaffi did it!" Yapyapyap. "Oh we gotta bomb this country!" "And we gotta bomb Iraq." "And Libya!" "And the other country!" "And Ruritania! Ruritania attacked us!" "Bombbombbombbomb!" Innocently I asked, "What's going on?" "What?! Haven't you heard?!? Terroists just crashed into the WTC Towers!" The noisiest of all was this one woman who frequently complained at how badly managed EVERYTHING was, so of course she was describing how things should have been done so this wouldn't have happened. (It's a good thing some people end up as housewives living on welfare and child support; if they ended up as Secretary of Defense, the nastier powers that be would have reason to hate us for being more trigger-happy than they are, or than we are now.
So to this I said, "Okay, some rookie pilot got confused when he was stacking into or out of LaGuardia. Big deal." Inwardly, I added 'Could any of us done any better or worse?' "Nonono, you don't get it!! We're being attacked! We gotta defend ourselves." I'm not a pacificist by any stretch of the imagination. I'm an Irish woman warrior who likes action flicks (but only when they have enough artistry or philosophy to balance them out). But, in the name of charity, I said, "We can't just go dropping bombs indiscriminately until we've found out who did this. We can't just reduce some innocent nation to a radioactive crater." The chief yapper piped in, "Well, would you want them to reduce US to a radioactive crater?!" I merely looked at her with mingled contempt and pity, and retreated behind "The Roots of Violence" (Ho, ho, ho.). I just so happened to be reading the chapter on Muslim extremists.
The bus driver had the radio on. The report came that the second tower got hit. The warmongers started gloating that they were right. In shock, I listened with ears dull to everything but the background jabbering, which sounded only like so many monkeys in the zoo. I got off at the CyberCafe of a community college in Lowell, intending to check my e-mail.
Wally the tech had the TV on. It took me forever to check my messages, since the Internet... was... JAMMED!!! The CC has ISDN connections, but the download time went slower than the 56K modem on my home computer. In between waiting for pages to load, I ended up overhearing the reports on the TV. I heard about the South Tower collapsing....And then I heard about a plane going down in D.C. They didn't say where in D.C., but my blood ran cold.
At the time, I was e-mailing with a young man I'd met through a Catholic singles site. He lived and worked in D.C. on the Presidential Economics Committee. As soon as that report came in, my blood turned to water in my veins. Ice water. I printed out a few messages and went out. It was almost time for my appointment anyway. Better early than never.
I had only about a half-mile walk to my therapist's office, but it felt like three miles. My mind started racing in all the wrong directions at that point. I had visions of Brian getting killed....or if he survived, we'd end up going to war and there'd be another draft and he'd get selected...I feared that the talk I'd heard about women getting drafted might come true. I'm willing to defend myself, but not against a foreign country. I don't want to get shipped like a commodity good to another land I've never seen and be forced to shoot at strangers, young people who, of themselves, are no better and no worse than I am. It's not that I'm unpatriotic; I just know I'm a very sensitive person and sending me into combat would just destroy me as a person. Plus, I have oversensitive hearing: loud noises just about drive me insane, so put me in combat and you have instant shellshock. I'd end up like one of those mentally demolished VietNam veterans you see living on the streets in Boston.
By a miracle, I crawled into the outer door of the office and just about collapsed on the floor. My therapist was right there, waiting for me. I lost it at that point. I think I screamed at the office workers who had the radio on; I said something like "Shut that [censored] thing off!!" I'd heard enough. But my therapist got me into her office without further incident and got me seated. I really lost it at that point: I think I started wailing. Somehow she calmed me down. I didn't feel better, but I didn't have to yell my lungs out.
Later, after the appointment, I returned to the CyberCafe, but I found it closed. The college campus had become a ghost town, parking lot empty, no sign of activity. I headed downtown. On the sidewalk, I passed by three dark kids, probably Hispanics, hangin' around, waiting for a ride. One of them said out loud, "We're always havin' trouble with them A-rabs." Another one, looking right at me as I passed by, said, "There goes one now." Now honestly. I'm a pale-skinned Caucasian with features that are alternately called French or Irish, depending on the viewer's ethnic background. I've done a little bit of anthropology, and I KNOW I don't look Arabic. I don't even dress in such a way that I could be mistaken for a Muslim woman. Yes, I wear long dresses and sometimes when I'm going to church, I might wear a black veil wound around my head, but I never wind it across my face! With my allergies, it might be too suffocating. And, for that matter, how would the veil fit under my glasses? (Yes, I'm speaking theoretically.)
I decided to go to the Lowell Library as I had business there. I ended up just dropping off my books: they too had closed.
I had banking to do, but decided to wait. They'd probably closed too. Even the Barnes and Noble bookstore had closed.
I went into St. Joseph the Worker's Shrine. Usually a good-sized crowd shows up for Mass, but today, it was packed to capacity and people were sitting on the chair-height heating units under the windows. I ended up sitting on the floor in the back. I went to light a candle before St. Joseph's statue, but all the candles were lit. For that matter, every candle before every statue had been lit.
I think I cried. Everyone cried that day, except the people too crass to care, and there are people like that. I cried enough to make up for their apathy.
When I came home, my mother met me at the door and hugged me. We held each other for a long, long time, both of us still crying. She'd seen the early coverage when she'd turned on the television shortly after I'd left, to watch the televised Mass. After that, she went about her own usual Tuesday morning routine, taking a walk around town to do some errands.
We lived just a few towns over from an airstrip, so we were accustomed to hearing aircraft of all kinds going over the house throughout the day, but we didn't hear a single plane or helicopter fly overhead. The stillness only added to the general feeling of gloom, Except at lunch, when we heard something small, probably a Cessna, pass over. But then we heard something bigger, like a fighter jet, swoop in and circle around. We would later hear from a friend in town that all civilian aircraft had been grounded for the day, but apparantly someone hadn't heard the order.
One thing that day helped me return to a sense of normalcy: helping my mother babysit the then 6-year old daughter of my dad's friend Norman. Usually she was a rather bouncy kid, but today even she was subdued. Still, we avoided talking about what had happened, we couldn't worry her.
My dad heard the news on the radio while he was watering plants in the greenhouse where he works, and his initial reaction was similar to mine. But then he when up to the farm stand connected with the greenhouse, for a coffee break, and he heard about the second plane hitting the second tower.
I remember watching the news coverage with my dad that evening and night. I don't remember if it was that night or what night it was when the news aired the footage taken by two Frenchmen, brothers, who had been in New York City making a documentary. But the image and the sounds, of the plane passing overhead, a black shadow swooping low against the buildings, then hitting the first tower with a soul-rending *BOOM*, will be burned into my memory for as long. They didn't air it that way, but my mind captured it in a nightmarish slow motion, as if that could somehow stop the impact. I still get sick to my stomach when these images replay through my mind, even to this day.
Next day, I returned to work at my night job, in a grocery store bakery, to find the store quiet. Very few people came in to order bread or pasteries. Not many people came in to shop much at all. The few that did came to buy necessities, bread and milk and eggs and such. My co-workers and I realized why: everyone was home watching the news coverage. In the days that followed, we ended up having a shortage of bagels and some of the breads: the dough came in as frozen proof, but our shipments had been stalled since the planes carrying them were grounded in Canada.
But we had no shortage of patriotic items. Our cake decorators started decorating cakes and large sugar cookies with red white and blue streamers, flag designs, or just stars and stripes. We could barely keep the display case stocked with flag cookies! On Friday, I heard from the ladies who worked in the craft department at a nearby Wal-Mart that they sold every swatch of red, white and blue ribbons and every flag kit they had, in just three days.
Friday night I had to work, but afterward, my dad took me to an inpromptu candelight vigil on the town common. We stood there holding candles and waving to the cars passing by and honking their horns in acknowlegement. I was holding up my free hand in a "V" salute, commonly mistaken for a peace symbol, but Winston Churchill, the PM of England during World War II, introduced it as the "Victory" salute. A few police cars and fire trucks passed by, off duty; we started cheering as they passed and they "blipped" their sirens in reply. I've always had respect for policemen and firefighters, but after 9-11, and hearing about the dozens of personnel who lost their lives when the Towers came down, my respect has doubled. Ordinary heroes, putting their lives on the edge for others. It takes guts to do that kind of work, and I admire them for it.
The tragedy came close to home when we heard at our parish, St. Francis in Dracut, Mass. about a funeral service for John Oganowski, the airline pilot aboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. My dad knew someone who had bought a tractor from this man, who rented out plots of land on his family's farm at small annual fees to Asian people in his community so they could grow vegetables and soybeans. Finding this out only made the tragedy seem even more real, that this was not some nightmare we would just wake up from.
In the middle of all this, my dad got to thinking about all the many symbols of our country, including the Statue of Liberty. He'd always wanted to see her up close, so he and I decided we'd drive down to New York City the following summer to see Lady Liberty.
The following July, 2002, we drove down one day; the following afternoon, we took the ferry to Liberty Island, and afterwards, when we came back to Manhatten, we walked up to Ground Zero. Most of the site had been cleared by then, but the clean up crews were still hard at work. We were lucky enough to get a good view from the observation deck.
Ground Zero has to be the most desolate site/sight I have ever seen. Rubble. Bits of steel and glass strew the ground. It's so big that the excavators at work in the middle of the two deep holes where the towers stood looked toy-sized. The wounds I carried from that terrible day reopened as I stood there, but somehow it was what we needed to do. It's a place that every American should visit once in their lifetime, to contemplate this terrible event, at least to keep from growing too comfortable. I think, as horrible as this tragedy is, we needed something like it to happen, to jolt us out of our little cozy-corners. It's a shame that it takes terrible things like this to get us to wake up to our own complacency, but it's like they say, if you're gonna make an omlet, you have to crack some eggs first.
At the one year anniversary, I went into Lowell again, this time to pray and remember. The atmosphere was different: the military had gone into Afghanistan in an effort to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and his minions. We still haven't found him yet, but there again, it took the Allies almost twenty years to finally track down Adolf Eichmann, the man largely responsible for the Holocaust. The sky was clear early that morning, as clear as it had been that morning one year before, but as if nature were mourning with us, by midafternoon, clouds moved in, hiding the sun and a cold wind kicked up, coming due north, as if to symbolise the winds of war that would be sweeping across our world as we would later move in on Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden's chief ally.
We still have a long road ahead of us. Perhaps we will never be quite free of the suffering this event has caused. But if we use this suffering to strengthen ourselves, it will not be in vain.