[Pops]

It’s the American way.
So today there are topics about how girls are like tape, which printer to buy and Israel
Is there any patriotism left out there…. hello?
I am pissed. I see no one with a single thought about today.
Nada.

I am an old time/new time democrat. – yea that means I am for the working guy and the rich guy better work for his keep as well. I don’t give a hoot about who you do, or what your color, or your persuasion –
Didn’t anyone have any feelings five years ago?
Or am I the only one to think about that today?
Or are we gonna talk about how both parties are the same and it doesn’t matter whether we vote and the corporations control everything and TPTB did 9/11 and, and…

Tribes
Communities
Bullshit…
This site is full of a bunch of internet eunuchs playing with their mouse.
*spit*

[Jack]

Well...I remember when it happened. I was in the gym, watching the events as they unfolded on television. I - perhaps like most - had not considered that such an attack might be possible. It took quite some time to sink in.

Once, quite a number of years ago, I ate at Windows on the World - that was the restaurant and club at the top of the WTC. The view was beautiful; sunset in New York. The food was pretty good too. Windows was later acquired by CCA (Club Corp of America). Their newsletter, post-911, spoke of the people they had lost - cooks preparing salads and other food for the day, cleaning people, waiters. Of course, once the attack begain, they had no chance to escape. Ordinary people, who (arguably) had never hurt anyone, wiped out in a particularly horrific way. It adds a certain impact when you've actually been in a place like that, even though it was decades ago. I cannot imagine what it must be like for those more closely connected.

Then and now, I have my opinions about what our reaction should have been. Were I to type them, I suppose I'd be obligated to delete my own post and suggest that I be suspended for a couple weeks - so I won't do that. I guess that what I've written conveys the idea well enough. In any case, we won't do what I think should have been done - more pointedly, should be done. Instead, we're involved in a bizarre exercise in nation building that seems doomed to embarrasing failure; and may bring greater disaster upon us. It may be that others, like I, avoid posting their views lest they meet with censure. Or, more pointedly, censorship. (Not at this site, of course.)

And, too - I do not think we are any longer one nation. As one wise poster (my apologies - I do not recall the name. Smallpox Girl, perhaps?), we are disparate groups held together with the duct tape of opulence. We do not care about our fellow citizens so much any more.

Note well - after 911 there was no call to arms. No trumpets that summoned us to shared effort and mutual sacrifice. Rather, we were told to go forth and spend, consume, and produce. Which it seems we did.

Nations and empires have pinnacles. I think that, perhaps, 911 signaled our own. I'd like to be shown I'm wrong.

[seahorse]

Pops,

Five years ago I was so angry I broke a piece of antique furniture and went to give blood. I'm angry still, bc our country does nothing to reduce its dependence on foriegn oil and, thus, we are funding the very guys we are fighting. Makes no sense. We've wasted a lot of time, money and lives that could easily have been spent on an energy Manhattan project, but no. I'm still patriotic as ever, but I don't think our CONgress is.

As for all the other threads here on things like women being one sided tape etc., not everyone here is an American, so I don't expect them to care about 9-11, but glad you made a post here on the Americas forum today.

[rwwff]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I')s there any patriotism left out there…. hello?

[emailking]

9/11 was an important event, whatever your take on it. But I'm a physicist/mathematician and don't see anything special about the number 5.

Basically, there's nothing priveledged about today as opposed to yesterday or tomorrow relating to how 9/11 effects our lives.

So I've been ignoring the news all day and am watching football now.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'D')idn’t anyone have any feelings five years ago?

Or am I the only one to think about that today?

Or are we gonna talk about how both parties are the same and it doesn’t matter whether we vote and the corporations control everything and TPTB did 9/11 and, and…


Tribes

Communities

Bullshit…

[Princess]

Pops, five years ago I was riding up an elevator to work in Chicago listening to a woman talk about a plane flying into the World Trade Center. My first thought was, "Great! Some drunk pilot has flown his frackin' Cesna into the WTC and now ruined flying for the rest of us." How wrong I was.

My boss had made his own travel arrangements that day (which he never did again) and was suppose to be flying back from NYC. I didn't know where he was or even what plane he was on. He was on one of the last planes to land at O'Hare airport that day. Thank God!

By 10am, I was working across the street from the #1 terrorist target in the USA, the Sears Tower. I worked there for three more years. Every day I went to work, I had a knot in my stomach. Would today be the day the crazies actually do it again and take down the Sears Tower?

These days I still can not watch 9/11 coverage without breaking out in uncontrollable tears. I don't fly (mostly 'cause I feel like a piece of meat being thrown about by the airlines than a fear of terrorists). I decided that today would be a day without 9/11. Except for accidentally looking at the calendar/clock on my computer desktop when it said 9:11am on September 11 and freaking out, I managed nicely today.

I'm sorry you felt the need to call us eunichs and spit on us. I have many complex feelings about this day, most of which I don't care to inflict on others. I'm tired of crying over this date. I just want to live my life in peace.

[Heineken]

My own feelings about 9/11 have been heavily colored by the Bush regime's co-opting it as a political and propaganda tool. The media, as usual, play along shamelessly.

10,000 children starve every day, but you don't hear Bush or his media punks talking about that.

We also rarely if ever hear discussion of the underlying cause of 9/ll---deep antagonism of the world's poor in general, and of Islamic peoples in particular, by US imperial policies.

Nevertheless, I am sorry for every single innocent soul who was lost in the 9/ll incidents, just as I am sorry for any innocent person who dies unnecessarily and meaninglessly.

[azreal60]

Pops.

I learned long ago that when dealing with your emotions, it's healthy at a certain point to let go. After letting go, care to tell me rationally what I should be doing other than thinking for a moment on the loss our nation suffered 5 years ago?

Should I be fighting in iraq, which certainly had nothing to do with 9/11?

Should I be fighting in afganistan, where our presence seems to be convincing more and more people to believe in the taliban?

Should I be beating up arab people on the street, as obviously they are terrorists?

I mean, you say we should be doing something else without mentioning what it is. I don't believe in memorial ceremonies. I believe they cheapen things beyond belief. When something about 9/11 comes on, I turn it off. Why you ask? I don't need some guy with a 200 dollar haircut telling me how to feel about something. I know how I felt on that day, and I know how I feel now. And my thoughts on 9/11 are not for a site on peakoil. They are for myself.

And frankly, if you spit on me, no offense, but I'd pop ya in the face bud.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('azreal60', 'W')hen something about 9/11 comes on, I turn it off.

[oil4u]

Sure Pops, I'm as mad as anyone and I hate what I see today. Five years ago, we saw what Islam is really all about, and today we do nothing, except make the problem worse! Nothing short of victory over Islam is acceptable and unfortunately most Western nations fail to see this. What was stopped at the Gates of Vienna will not be stopped today. Britain and most of Europe are already lost. Are we next?

"Thousands of students from Saudi Arabia are enrolling on college campuses across the United States this semester under a new educational exchange program brokered by President Bush and Saudi King Abdullah."


I pray for the families, and those that were connected to the victims of 9/11!

[seldom_seen]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I')s there any patriotism left out there…. hello?

[WildRose]

Pops, as you may or may not know, I'm a Canadian, living in Alberta. I remember 9-11 well. I was just getting my kids ready for school and watching all the news coverage. I stayed home most of the day, in fact, glued to the reports. I remember I felt shock, sadness and fear. The loss of life at the WTC and the Pentagon and on all the planes was horrific to me. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be a passenger on one of those planes. And, as awful as all of that was, I felt fear because the Pentagon had been attacked and, in my naive thinking, I supposed that World War III may well be on the way. I went for a long walk that day and prayed for whatever intervention possible to prevent that from happening. Later, I remember actually feeling surprised that there hadn't been more of a reaction from Bush & Co.

9-11 forced me to start thinking about what was really going on in the world, as events relate to geopolitics, energy, and the world's major religions. I regret that so many innocent people in the ME have died, that so many US and allied soldiers have died. I regret Canada's involvement in all of this, and I'm just hoping it won't expand. Closer to home, I regret that the events of 9-11 and the whole "war on terror" thing have allowed suspicion of people of the Muslim faith to enter our community, as there are many wonderful Muslim people living close to us.

Yeah, the whole thing has left quite an imprint in my mind, although I can't say patriotism has anything to do with it.

[Colorado-Valley]

I was out irrigating alfalfa and didn't really have much time to watch it.

Having seen so much damn tragedy in the world over the last 40 or 50 years, this just seemed like more of the same to me. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, same old, same old ...

Out here in the West, I live above the graves of thousands of slaughtered native Americans. No one has ever shed a tear for them, and their tragedy was massive.

[aflatoxin]

Five years ago, I went to a project in the far NW US. My plane was very delayed. I was in First Class on a 767, and there was a very old Israeli man seated next to me. We had a memorable conversation. He was certainly no yamukah wearing, M-16 toting, Ben Guiron clone. He was Jewish, and had a pretty realistic assesment of the situation in the ME.

The next morning, I started to drive to work at the pipeline station at 6:00 AM. I remember being irritated at the smartass disc jockeys talking about an airplane flying into a skyscraper.
I watched the second plane hit the WTC in the control room of one of the biggest NG pipelines in the US, about 25 feet from the canadian border.

About a week later, one of the pipeline operators in Idaho almost shot me when we showed up at his compressor station at 06:00, with a large lab trailer, because nobody told him we were coming. The stupid asshole though we were terrorists. It was at that point that I realized that we had turned the corner as a nation, and the end was on the horizon.

I decided, at that point, the smartest thing to do was to keep my mouth shut. And, I have.

[BlisteredWhippet]

I was walking off a ferry in Washington state and wondered why there were a couple of federal types taking pictures of everyone coming off the ramp with very large cameras. Picked up the story on radio an hour later.

I went through all the stages of dealing with something. But I also recognize that now, 9/11 is just a totem to bully people around like Santa Claus is a totem to bully people into mass consumption every Christmas.

Break out the Kleenex, its September 11th again. Jesus Christ, you fucking pussy.

And you're a proud Democrat... that doesn't surprise me either, you facist toady. Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up... see the last bleeding heart liberal... he's been used and abused his whole life, and what does he have to show for it? If you have a flag wave it back at him!

[gg3]

Pops: If you want to see a 9/11 memorial topic here and you don't see it, start one. But the way you started this one, you shot yourself in the foot. "Eunuchs" and "spit"? Sorry dude, though I usually agree with you, but this time I'm calling BULLSHIT.

---

Two close members of my family were direct witnesses to the attacks, one in NYC, one in DC. Both of them were scared shitless.

A close friend of mine in Army intel has done two tours in Iraq, headed for a third. "Today's weather, 115 in the shade, with occasional incoming mortars." When the attacks occurred, he was in another part of the world on another base, and spent most of the day rallying his subordinates to the inevitability of the tasks they had trained for.

Five years ago this morning, I was dragged out of sleep by the red phone ringing next to my bed, to hear my admin assistant telling me the towers had been taken down and the Pentagon had been hit. I thought she was mistaken and I turned on the radio, and the first thing I heard was that ominous terrible silence with little background noises, that one often hears when a radio station is running live during a major emergency and they're between bulletins. Then they repeated a summary of the news thus far. All I could say was "Oh my God, no!" over and over again, and then, "We'd better find out who did this and pulverize them before they do it again!"

I had to work that day. The first client site was next to a major regional airport. The absence of planes in the sky was creepy as hell. I finished up that case as best I could, and called my admin assistant and told her to cancel my schedule for the rest of the day.

During the day I managed to hold it together pretty well and keep doing my job and managing all the stuff that depends on me, of which there is much and it has grown steadily since then. But at night... well, for the first year after the attack, I slept with a light on in my room.

A few years later I worked on countermeasures to the IED problem (Improvised Explosive Devices, aka roadside bombs in Iraq), long before this became a big item in the media. The bottom line was that there is no solution, none, zero, zip. The IEDs will necessarily evolve faster than the countermeasures. There is only one way to fight them, which is to keep roads under 24/7 surveillance and be prepared to shoot anyone seen planting one. Otherwise we are screwed. Or more precisely, our people over there are screwed.

My soft-ass civilian attempt to contribute to the war effort produced a zero. There are people on this board who are warriors and people on this board who are veterans. Their contributions in the past and present, are what's made a difference, and God bless them.

---

I am so sick of all of this. We have a mediocre administration in office that can't even keep a lid on some of our most vital national secrets (look up the Iran Crypto Leak and Ahmed Chalabi), can't equip its warriors adequately, and can't plan the post-maneuver phase of a conflict to save its ass from an alligator.

We won the war in Afghanistan and now the Taliban are back and they've just brought in a world-record opium crop that will produce enough heroin to provide for 150% of total world demand. This will become the next drug epidemic: "speedballs," cheap heroin mixed with cheap speed. Mark my words, you saw that prediction here first.

Our military won the actual war in Iraq (defeat opposing force, depose its government) in three weeks, just as Bush said, and then our civilian "leaders" bungled the occupation plan like a football player running at top speed toward his own goal post.

And now the Paki government, who Bush calls allies and friends, have just signed a peace agreement with the Taliban in the tribal areas, promising to not bother them any more and also to let them have their weapons back. As I said somewhere else, I hope the hell Osama is nice and comfortable in his Paki cave, and I hope he has a telephone and uses it freely, as it just might prove his undoing. One can hope, anyway.

This after the Pakis got their own atomic bomb and their lead nuclear scientist proliferated nuclear weapons design information all over the world to one hostile regime after another.

---

I've barely scratched the surface, and what I don't say would fill more volumes than what I do say.

So yeah we can dredge up all that misery and add it to the misery of the latest news about energy & resource depletion, the climate emergency, the population time-bomb, and the growing tyranny. But "that" misery belongs to the past, and "these" miseries belong to the present and the future that we all are trying to face and prepare for.

Spitting on our those we fundamentally agree with will get us nowhere.

Mourning forever and getting depressed will get us nowhere.

Grim determination is better; and putting money & muscles where mouths & mice are is even better.

The best thing we can do about the past is to fight for the future and build the future: a world that's truly worth living in.

[Aaron]

Save your spit for the murdering scumbags...

[Heineken]

. . . of whom Bush is the prime example.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'B')ut the way you started this one, you shot yourself in the foot.