It’s been 10 years since that horrible Tuesday back in 2001. I know we all remember where we were, but let me briefly let you know where I was. I was working in the tech call center of a law firm in Cleveland. The law firm is right on the border of Cleveland and Ohio as well. The surroundings were as solid as they could be…prior to 9/11. Out my window was a small airport known as Burke Lakefront Airport. Directly across the street from my office was a building that none of us ever thought about – The Anthony J. Celebrezze Federal Building. Right down the street about a block – Cleveland’s FBI headquarters. Simply, you felt nothing but safe being where I was on 9/11…and you never even considered a thought of something happening.
To be even more clear, where I am and who I am was different on 9/11. I didn’t look at people on the street like I do now. I never had a thought in my head like “I wonder if this guy is part of a cell”. I didn’t start walking with a key firmly planted between my fingers so I could take out someone’s eye or their throat if they ever approached me to “kill the infidel”. Being honest, I don’t think I ever even considered people of Arab descent as anything other than dudes trying to make a the same go at life that I was. Naive or not, I always believed that we all wanted the same thing – a little money, a cool wife and kids, and an entertaining life where we could get some enjoyment in before shuffling off the planet and giving the next generation their chance at the same thing.
That all changed before 9am on September 11th. We were working on the tech desk when the internet went down. We didn’t know that anything bad had happened, as an internet outage wasn’t exactly uncommon. It came up and down for a few minutes, and we quickly learned that a plane had hit the first tower. “Damn, that’s fucked up”, and that’s all it was. Seriously, not even a thought that anyone was actually hurt. The callousness of our existences was in full effect and the bottom line was, “didn’t see it, doesn’t effect me”. When we got word that a second plane had hit though, everything changed. Our office went into full panic. People were crying. People with kids were scrambling to find their bosses so they could leave to go get their kids. I moved down to our conference room where a crowd of attorneys, secretaries and staffers had all gathered to watch what was happening on the big screen TV the room had. It was a gruesome site. People jumping out of windows. People begging for help out the windows. And no one to help any of them. Our conference room was filled with tears. My wife called me panicked. She wanted to go get my kids out of the school. My only question was ‘where are you going to take them that’s safe?’ Everyone’s phones started lighting up that there were terrorists that had planes all over the place – 10, maybe 20 planes. Planes in Texas, Washington, Florida, California, etc. No one knew what was going on, but we were all scared.
I won’t lie – I went back to my office, staring out the window at the airport and thinking, “if this is it, you’d better come right through this window and take me, motherfucker”. I was almost daring it to happen. It didn’t, obviously. What was weird though was looking out the window, I could see the entire city evacuating. People were leaving the airport. I saw people I recognized from the Federal Building in the parking lot trying to leave. Everyone evacuated EXCEPT my building, which was right in the center of Cleveland’s “targets”.
Finally, around 2pm, I left the office and went home. I remember looking up at the sky over and over throughout the hour long drive home…stunned by not seeing anything. No planes. No plane trails. No clouds even.
I got home. My wife was curled up on the couch just watching CNN. Over and over, they showed the events. The planes hitting. The buildings falling. I think this might have been the last time the pundits were quiet. They really didn’t talk much – the horrific videos did all the talking. I don’t think we moved the rest of the day – watching it over and over until 2 or 3 in the morning; not talking, not comforting each other, not paying the slightest bit of attention to the kids, what was going on outside, anything.
Fast forward a couple days though, and things just didn’t seem right – at least to me. I remember one event sticking in my head firmly from 9/11 or 9/12, and it still hasn’t left me. There was a report that they found the terrorists car at Logan Airport in Boston, and in it they found flight schedules, a Koran, and a suicide note. All I could think was why would these guys that were so thought out and careful do something so amateurish as connecting all the dots for the people they wanted to kill. It wasn’t long before other things just didn’t make sense. The fires were so hot that they could melt a building enough to cause it to fall within 2 hours, but yet a passport from one of the terrorists was magically found day one on top of the pile? C’mon man. We all saw those explosions. It’s hard to fathom that a 10 page passport would survive that fireball. And, for that matter, why exactly was a guy who’s goal was to die for the cause, and who was flying a 1-way domestic flight, carrying a passport in the first place?
I’ve watched a shitload of JFK movies, and I’ll admit that I’m conspiratorial a lot of the time, but this just didn’t seem very new to me. Much like with JFK, it wasn’t long before there was legislation that was changing the course of history thrown on the desk, pushed through the Congress and Senate, and signed into law while our “fuck those ragheads” attitude was still brimming. The Patriot Act, which made so many parts of our world change, was rammed through while we were willing to do ANYTHING in the name of protection. To make the parallel comparison, this is akin to President Johnson changing legislation that pushed us into Vietnam for a decade within a day after Kennedy left his head in the streets of Dallas.
To be honest, I was as dumb as anyone else back then, and I wanted the protection too. I was right there wanting that war. I wanted to kill those that would dare come onto our soil and kill our citizens, our friends and our families. Looking back though now, things truly seem like they were a far more convenient set of circumstances which has lead to our rights being dismantled systematically. Let’s look at what’s different.
1. Your communications are now subject to review for no real reason. Send an email, make a phone call, write a letter – it can all be reviewed with no cause. They call it preemptive. I relate it to how prisoners are treating in a supermax.
2. You can no longer go through an airport unmolested. To be clear, I used the word molested purposely. To prove I’m not a total conspiracy nut, I actually had no problem with the whole shoes and empty your pockets thing. Check the obvious – that’s fine. However, as with everything, they just intensify things more and more to make people less likely to fight back. Now, if you are going to visit a sick relative in another city or state, you can look forward to having your balls squeezed or your wife’s tits fondled in the name of “security”. If you want to opt out of that, you have the option to walk though a booth that will pummel your body with unregulated radiation that is, in essence, 10x stronger than what you would get if you have an X-Ray taken. Maybe I’m crazy, but when I’ve had X-Rays, they put a lead vest on me, and the tech runs out of the room to protect themselves. 10x that? Thanks, I’ll pass.
3. If you have a cellphone, you can now be tracked without cause. After 9/11, there was one of those undiscussed, quiet laws slipped in that mandates tracking tools be part of all cellphones.
4. You are now considered a terrorist and a racist if you don’t support the government’s information. Fresh out of the Chinese and Soviet playbook, you can no longer question anything without being labeled. Black president = me being a racist for thinking he and his unconstitutional policies suck. Fine, I’m a racist I guess.
5. Our freedom as a nation has been taken from us because of the financial murder we’ve been dealt in the name of “battling terrorism”. We’ve spent trillions now on Afghanistan, Iraqi, agency “infiltration”, NSA monitoring of all our communications, etc. Those trillions would certainly be useful right now to stimulate business and job growth.
6. Our rights as a fee nation have been taken from us by these corrupt politicans as a direct result of 9/11. Think about it, President Obama took our nation to war in Libya without going through the channels of law that have worked well for over 200 years. He did so because he takes his marching orders from NATO – not the people of the United States. This all started with the “coalition of the willing” after 9/11. Alliances were made that no longer found the US doing things for the best interests of the United States, but of the global power base. Why would they do that? Maybe because the banks that actually pull the strings are not sovereign, but look for control of all economics in a simple way. That would be the one currency, global governance system which is being pushed for more and more.
7. The leadership role of our country has shifted from “for the people” to a dictatorship. The most recent implementation of the “Council Of 13″ pretty much secured that. If a bill gets voted down, it then goes to a council of 13 people – 6 republicans and 6 democrats and whoever the president is – and their word is law. If we didn’t have partisan voting before, what do you think will come out of this. Think about it. Whatever side of the aisle you are on, if the president was from your party, why would you care if it got voted down in Congress. If the president is for it, these assholes will all vote along partisan lines and jam it through. Prior to 9/11, there is no conceivable way that a “council of 13″ could ever have been enacted. Any sitting president prior would have been facing impeachment hearings over this.
The sad truth is that we all died on 9/11. For those that died immediately, you obviously have the most compassion for them and their families as, in short, they didn’t deserve that in any way, shape or form. By that theory though, none of us deserve what we’ve been dealt since either. Ours is a slower, more deliberate death as a nation with our government executing our foundation one piece at a time. To the direct victims of 9/11, I’ll be right there shedding a tear for you today. I had a friend that was in the Trade Center and died on a job interview, so in some small way, I can relate to a loss from this event. In a much larger way, I can see clearly how our compassion as people for our friends and neighbors has been taken advantage of to feed the power base and enslave us as a people.
All the more proof you need of what’s going on comes from the fact that the first responders are not invited to the 9/11 ceremonies in New York. The first responders…the men and women who didn’t question the danger. The men and women who gave up their health, their time and for some, their lives, to help their fellow man. They are not wanted as part of the ceremony. Why not? My hunch is because these regular joes don’t represent the portrayal of power that these cunts in suits want to portray.
Rest in Peace everyone who died on 9/11, and those who’s loss of health and life can be directly attributed to the events of September 11th. The way this world is going, you may indeed be the lucky ones.
So, I’m reading the news today and I came across this story…”Government Paying Farmers, Ranchers $112 Million To Protect Bird Too Numerous To Be Threatened”.
