9/11: 17 years later and clearer than ever.

I remeber the morning well. I knew the world had changed that day and we would, Canada and the United States would be going to war. Which the British commonwealth did beside Americans.
Something that sadly gets overlooked these strange days.

I remember as the sky’s shut down, towns in the far east of Canada, little more than fishing villages and refueling stops for Trans-Atlantic flights welcomed hundreds of planes, thousands of people and gave them comfort regardless of country, race, religious beliefs or gender.

I remember very sadly as I saw on the noon news when my friends and I left work to watch the news as the second tower collapsed.
Thinking my Good Lord, someone used one of the planes I build with pride and turned it into a fucking bomb.

I remember sitting in Madison Square Garden a few years later talking with people who had actually witnessed their friends jumping to their deaths rather than burn alive. How these tough sons of britches, working men and women., strong people. Cried at the thought of it all years later.

I remember the calls for vengeance that I knew would come against a regime and people who were not our enemies. I remember seeing Canadian bodies coming home from a war that had to happen perhaps but in wholesale different manner and in a completely different country and way.

My High School World Politics teacher used to say that the only coin worth holding was trust. Trust was the coin of the realm, the only thing worth anything. We as a people, both political and basic were robbed that day and days since in ways both gross and sublime.
Slights of hand have happened to basic simple freedoms, taken for granted, unworked for in our generation.

The world as a whole as I look back has changed as I predicted, we went to war, crushed a region and unleashed exactly what the planners of 9 11 had hoped for all the long. Democratic common sense and reason at war with it’s self.

9/11: One Canadian Remembers.

It’s been nine long years since the events of September 11, 2001 happened and much like people who talk about remembering where they were when Kennedy was killed, I know that I will always have that fateful day burned deeply into my memory.

I remember sitting in my shared office at work my co-workers and I reading the newspaper and drinking our morning coffee as we did every other day before and since.  We were joking around listening to a local rock and roll station when the news slowly began to break from New York.

The reports sounded confused at first, a small plane had hit a building in New York, a Cessna one eye-witness had mistakenly reported.  It didn’t sound like a big deal at the time, we all went on drinking our coffee.  Then the news told of a second plane had crashed in New York, hitting the World Trade Centre and this time it was a commercial airliner.   Reports came with every song now, and it seemed prudent to change to a news radio station.

The second airliner approaching the World Trade Centre. (Photo: Reuters)