9/12 2006 (Five Years and a Day After)

I had made a point of not blogging on or around September 11. I figured much too much was already being said on the net. Besides that great miniseries “The Road to 9/11” was airing on ABC in place of Monday Night Football, now moved to ESPN. If you ask me, it was JFK’s fault. Think about this, Osama was born in 1957. The CIA under JFK had numerous opportunities to kill Osama as a four or five year old Saudi boy even before he became an Islamic fundamentalist. If the show happened to skip over the small matter of Osama being armed and financed by the CIA under Ronald Reagan, it’s obviously because 9/11 was all JFK’s fault since the 35th president was too busy having an affair with Marilyn Monroe to be concerned about the really bad things Osama would no doubt do in the future. If I were a serious blogger, I would have watched “The Road to 9/11” just so I could take notes and complain about it. I confess, I watched the Raiders get shutout by the Chargers on ESPN instead and then last night opted to make volleyball videotapes for my daughter to send out to colleges.

On 9/11 itself, I was on a business trip in Chicago and had literally flown in a few hours before the attacks. I called my office in Washington D.C. to check in and got an answering machine saying that no one would be in the rest of the day. Up to that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could have easily been flying into DC that day myself or that my office which overlooked the spot where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan was really only a couple miles from the Pentagon.

Skip ahead five years later, I’m at work and have to drop something off to a business that had worked with our office before. I find the address next door, but I don’t find the actual address. I call information on my cell phone and they tell me the business isn’t listed at all. I call my office and our receptionist gets me the direct phone number. I dial and get the following answering machine message,

“If you are calling for “business X”, XXXX died suddenly last week and we are no longer in business. I can not help you either because I am still recovering from the accident. If you need xxxx, please contact another business that does what we do.”

It was sad and darkly funny at the same time. The person we did business with was simply no longer, the business no longer existed, and the only thing that remained was this answering phone message. I’m sure the place of business still stands, but the fact that I couldn’t find it between the two addresses that should have bracketed it just added to the effect.

I began multiplying this one suddenly no longer living person by the thousands in my head and suddenly on September 12, 2006 as much as I had intended to downplay 9/11, I found myself unexpectedly feeling rather than thinking about 9/11.

The disappearance of person X with whom I meant to do business yesterday logically has nothing to do with planes crashing into buildings five years ago. My gut tells me though that 9/11 and the wars that have ensued allegedly in response to 9/11 have ripped a hole in our world. As I listened to that answering machine message, I was running my fingers across the tiny part of the hole that begins with people deciding that mass killing is somehow sane and retaliation with more mass killing is even more sane.
The worst thing of all was that I felt that tiny hole for what amounted to thirty seconds and all I knew was that it’s only getting bigger not smaller. To me, that’s the real terror.

chancelucky