KickIdle.com Blog

As part of the Where Were You meme, I posted this on Facebook…

I was working midnights at the time. My brother woke me up around 3:00pm with a phone call. I thought he was trying to pull some sort of joke on me until I finally went downstairs and turned on the TV. I immediately thought of the Tom Clancy novel (Executive Decision?) where the 747 crashes into the US Capital building. It was very surreal to watch the collapse of one of the other WTC buildings live (the two big towers had already collapsed).

I was working for a gov’t agency at the time. When I drove into work that evening at 10:00pm, the security was cranked way up! Police with M-16s and body armor. They stopped my car and looked through everything – all inside, through the trunk, under it with mirrors, inside the engine compartment. It took a few weeks before they started slacking off even a little bit…

It’s hard to believe it’s been 8 years since that happened. And even more amazing to consider all the things that have happened in our country since then. We’ve given up huge amounts of our civil liberties, implicitly endorsed torture as acceptable, invaded two sovereign nations (and not “won” either war yet), entered a whole new realm of “security theater” whenever we travel, had major terrorist attacks abroad and minor ones domestically, and been a victim of a banking crisis of our own making with a bigger economic impact than 9/11 had, elected a non-white as President, and are on the cusp of changing the face of health insurance in this country…

It’s been a long crazy ride and I don’t think there’s much evidence that it’ll be over any time soon…