Today 22 years ago was a Tuesday.
And a swift change of direction for America, and the world. Of course, this day a couple of decades and change ago, we really didn’t understand just how shitty and horrible was GW Bush and his boys. They upset the fabric of humanity and it’s never really been the same since. People born after 9/11/01 have existed in a weird-ass different landscape than the older folks. A similar, though, not as brutal and violent, incident as us boomers and our Kennedy assassination event — live color TV changes the surreal images of history, to say the least.
Plus, we had the Beatles arrival/experience just weeks later to give the Dallas story a peculiar, particular shine, an odd social reframing of a sad, terrible circumstance of then-slow-sequence history.
However, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were an actual real-time death scream:
The 9/11 attacks left 2,977 dead across New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania, according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. That total includes the 2,753 who died after the planes struck the Twin Towers, 184 people at the Pentagon and 40 people who died when Flight 93 crash-landed in Pennsylvania.
The youngest flight passenger who died was Christine Hanson, a 2-year-old on her way to Disneyland on United Airlines Flight 175. The oldest was Robert Norton, 82, who was on American Airlines Flight 11.
Yet, in the past 22 years, even more death — 9/11 responder John Feal, now an advocate for related health care (CBS News): ‘“We advocate 364 days out of the year. We take that one day off to stop the advocacy to pay respect to those who died on 9/11 … There’s now over 27,000 certified people with a 9/11-certified cancer … The numbers continue to grow… Eight thousand pounds of steel crushed my left foot. I would up spending 11 weeks in the hospital … My injury, while gruesome and horrific, pales in comparison to those who got sick and died … Three hundred and fifty-plus trips to D.C., over 2,300 meetings … The bills we got passed in Congress don’t save lives, but it gives people a fighting chance … To the children who lost a parent in the building that day or a cop or a firefighter, those who ran into harm’s way, never stop talking about your loved one.”‘
My 9/11 story happened the day before, Monday, Sept.10: I drove my daughter to her job that morning and while on the way we got into a discussion. She was then married to a guy in the US Navy and she was wondering how safe was the situation for him, being in the military and all.
I told her he was perfectly safe, ‘unless, of course, there’s a war.’ I truly emphasized those last words with a smirk.
Shitty dumb.
A reflex of that day per Encyclopedia Britannica:
A remembrance, yet all this time later here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: ‘Twin Towers,’ oil by Preston Sandlin, and found here.)