Bin Laden's Real 9-11 Purpose Being Fulfilled Today

Hard to believe isn't it?

Fourteen years ago this morning, my then-fiance, now-husband woke me up with, ''Celina, you need to get up. Something bad's happening." I was still working in restaurants at the time and had closed the night before, which meant I didn't get home from post-work bar stool occupation until around 3 AM. Normally, nothing would have dragged me out of bed before noon.

But that day was different. That day, I went into the living room of our itty bitty house in time to watch the first World Trade Center tower fall. 

Every generation has a moment of history they remember always with absolute clarity. I'm not talking about personal history, but national or cultural or global. My mother remembered watching the Nazis roll into Paris when she was four, for example, and could describe everything she experienced during the course of that day from the fear to her father's anger to the smells of food coming from the kitchen of the restaurant he owned to the unnatural, sullen silence of the Parisians who watched, glowering, at the goosestepping army. My generation has a lot of those moments both good and bad--Watergate, the Miracle on Ice, the Challenger explosion, the Reagan assassination attempt, Live Aid--I could go on probably for a long time about all of these events. But only one do I envision over and over again.  Only one intrudes on my dreams at night. Only one is seared on the backs of my eyelids so that I relive it every year on the same day. 9-11. The 2001 part is unnecessary. It's just 9-11, the darkest day in modern American history.  Our Pearl Harbor. And even as the name "Pearl Harbor" incites a low, dark, growling kind of nationalist pride tempered with defiance and honed by anger, so too does 9-11. 

Both will do so for a long time. But patriotic anger has the natural habit of converting into something else, building slowly and silently within our nation's culture, and I fear that's what is happening now in the US.

One of the advantages of living in America is that no one is stupid enough to attack us overtly. They don't send ships to try to blockade our coastlines--mostly because there's not a navy in the world that could possibly hope to succeed at doing so. Planes need bases to take off, land, and refuel from, and we'd see anyone coming a long time before they got into our waters these days. But terrorists with box cutters, seeking not money or concessions but death and the ability to deal death to thousands of others--well, we can't always see those guys coming. Despite our technological and financial superiority, we'll never be able to either. As the Boston Marathon bombing proved, all the espionage innovations imaginable aren't going to detect a pair of men with a grudge and a homemade bomb filled with screws and sharp metal. That's the new reality of our world, a reality that hadn't really been considered before 9-11-2001. 

How long will this reality remain in place? The wars in the Middle East continue unabated, as they have since Israel became a state in 1948. Refugees from Middle Eastern countries are trying desperately to emigrate to another country--any other country--and, much like what happened after the concentration camps were liberated in Europe after Germany's fall, the European nations aren't all that interested in helping out. The Americans aren't interested in helping out either. According to the New York Times, the US announced a few hours ago that we would increase our intake of Syrian refugees "at least" to10,000 over the next year. The height of irony is that Germany has opened its doors where the US would not. Germany's numbers? They will accept half a million refugees a year. Other European countries--

France--24,000 over two years

Great Britain--20,000 over five years

Norway--8,000 by 2017

Finland 1,050 this year 

And what makes this truly tragic is the undeniable and ugly edge of racial profiling that is being wielded here, as evidenced by this same New York Times article: 

The announcement brought a variety of reactions that underscored how the refugee crisis has become another polarized political question. Aid groups called the administration’s action a token one given the size of the American economy and population, while a number of Republicans warned that Mr. Obama was allowing in potential terrorists. “Our enemy now is Islamic terrorism, and these people are coming from a country filled with Islamic terrorists,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York. “We don’t want another Boston Marathon bombing situation.”

Flabbergasted yet? This, our new reality, is the direct result of that September morning fourteen years ago. I went to sleep on September 10, 2001 still thinking that American claims to sanctuary and political asylum were sacrosanct. Unchangeable, because that concept was the foundation of American autonomy. 9-11 changed all that. When those planes slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when American passengers took their fate into their own hands and overpowered the terrorists on their plane before disintegrating upon contact with a Pennsylvanian field, the arms of America closed. No longer were we interested in offering refuge to the "wretched refuse" of any "teeming shore". Only non-Middle Eastern shores would provide immigrants deemed to be safe for inclusion in the US.

Not real fond of immigrants south of the border either. Makes me wonder--there's been a lot of talk in the past year about the Black Lives Matter movement. President Obama has referenced it himself. But I just have to assume that brown lives do not matter, just as Jewish lives didn't matter before WWII--and Holocaust survivors' lives didn't matter all that much post-war either. Didn't know that, did you? Thousands of lives could have been saved from the death camps if the US or UK, for example, had allowed Jews to immigrate from Germany and Austria in 1938-39. After the fall of Nazi Germany, British ships turned away vessels with hundreds, thousands of Jews from the Middle East for several years. Once the UN granted Israel statehood, the UK pulled every single man, machine, and ship out and left Israel to fend for itself. They stood absolutely alone. Even the US under Truman embargoed the sale of arms and ammunition to any country in the Middle East. In order for Israel to survive, it would have to do so without the help of any other country. 

So we've got a history of doing things like this before. The Statue of Liberty, which stands so proudly in New York Harbor, is now a fallacy, a broken, forgotten icon of an ideology that was destroyed in a wave of paranoia and prejudice only thinly veiled by political double speak. Emma Lazarus's poem, once so inspiring to so many, might as well be the ingredients list on a box of cereal anymore. 

Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, 
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.        

The golden door was slammed shut fourteen years ago today. While I understood the necessity of doing so back then, I don't see why such isolationism should still exist today. And it wouldn't, if it wasn't for the bean-headed ignorance of politicians like NY Rep. King, continuing to stir it up. 

Because see--here's the thing: Bin Laden's goons didn't just destroy buildings or New York City. The planes weren't his victory over us. This racial profiling, these paranoid ideologies and delusions of danger are his real victory. He conquered us, not with violence but with fear that makes our nation reject the very principles upon which it was built. 

His victory is now, today, in our living rooms and schools and shopping centers and government. HE created the fear, and upon that foundation of terrorism we allowed our government to construct this thought process that when we let people into the country, we are bringing in potential terrorists instead of citizens. 

It doesn't seem like fourteen years ago this morning, the Twin Towers fell. If only we'd known then what was being dragged down with them, would our course have changed? Or would we still find ourselves here, trying to publicly justify why we should keep families fleeing from a never-ending war outside our borders?

I'm not even sure if I want to know the answer to that question. 

So I'll watch the memorial services, as I always do. The reading of the names, the bells chiming, the whole and sickening replay of that day's events unfurling seamlessly in my mind's eye. I will say a prayer for those victims, as I always do. And I'll wonder how long the Statue of Liberty will remain, gleaming upon her pedestal, before hypocrisy tears her down. 

The Day You Never Forget

Most of the time, people think I'm a pretty tough kind of gal.  I am, I suppose, in a lot of ways.  I say what I think--sometimes at a cost to myself--and once I finally learned to be at peace with myself (a process I don't discuss with anyone other than my husband, perhaps, and my daughters) I was able to walk that fine line between assertive and bitch fairly well.

Unless I get mad, which is a whole other story.

I think every generation has a day they'll never collectively forget.  For my father and his siblings, it was Pearl Harbor.  What else could compete with that event marring their young lives? For my mother, it was a dual memory--the Nazis fleeing Paris and the Allies entering it.  There were several that vied for that title in my youth. I vaguely remember Watergate; I had chicken pox and was home from first grade and there was NOTHING ELSE ON TV.  Then President Reagan getting shot. And Pope John Paul II. And John Lennon.  Then, when I was in college, the Challenger disaster, brought home to me on a whole new level because the daughter of one of the crew members went to the same school in the same department that I was in and I knew her.

But will anything take the place of 9-11?

I'm not going to go into that particular day. That story isn't important.  But I'm sitting here now, ten years later absolutely glued to the television set watching all these terrible shows. I'm morbidly fascinated by hearing the experiences of these survivors and the stories of those who didn't.  I'm glued to the TV screen, listening to the analytical details of how the structures were compromised, how the passengers fought in Pennsylvania, how the firefighters in that one lone stairwell managed to walk away.  That day marked me in so many ways that even now, ten years later I can still feel all the shock, the horror, the absolutely gut-wrenching fear those events caused. 

And yet, I can't escape it, and don't even try.

In a way, that whole day is kind of a blur.  Our workplace didn't close, despite the whole state of Ohio rolling up like a big carpet.  I was stuck there, at Applebees, and only two tables came in. So we were sitting there, with all that news coverage on all those television sets. And that's when, to me, one of the most shocking things of that whole damn day happened.

I was watching the beginning of President Bush's televised address when one of the other servers came up and grabbed my arm.

"Hey," he said. "I need you to lead the birthday song for my table."

Do what?  This guy was a nice enough fellow, but he was also a member of a church that doesn't believe in celebrating birthdays.  The table he was referring to was a group of young women in their early twenties. All I could think of in that moment was the absolute irony, the insensitivity of his request.  I threw his hand off my arm and snarled, "No one will ever have a birthday on September 11 again, you *bleepity-bleep* moron. Sing it your own damn self if it's so important to you."

He looked kind of puzzled and said, "But I can't sing happy birthday--"

"God will forgive you for that quicker than for pretending that this--" and I pointed at the screen "--didn't happen."

He went away.

Strange.  Now I don't remember what the President specifically said during that speech. I remember the feelings I had as I watched it, and the tiniest little moment of reassurance afterwards.  I remember the phone call I got from a friend in New York who'd been off that day from work at Windows Over The World and thus escaped the destruction of the World Trade Center. I remember long hours of working to gather water bottles and shoes and non-perishable food and shipping it off to the rescue workers at Ground Zero. I remember the restaurant down the street, not two block from where I'm sitting now, pouring out every bottle of French wine from its incredible wine cellar into the street when France refused to cooperate in the allied war in the Middle East.

But instead of remembering what the President said to reassure the country, I remember that callous request, and the look of surprise on that young server's face when I yelled at him.  I was too immature to realize that maybe that callousness was the result of a young man in his early twenties, seeing the face of war rise over the horizon.  I was just mad--furious and seething and pissed off--and he was too insensitive to recognize that emotion swirling through all of us there that night.

My reputation was solidified in this town after that night. I was thought of as a bad-ass from that night on, something only reinforced by years of tending bar after that.

And yet, all these years later when I watch these shows, that grief hasn't really lessened.  I watch the Twin Towers come down, and the Pentagon security camera film, and all those poor, doomed people who chose the death of the freefall over the death of the flames and I still sorrow for them all. 

That day, 9-11-2001, marked not only MY generation, but my parents and my children's. Now my son-in-law is stationed in the Middle East, still fighting the war that began that day, while my daughter and her daughter live with me, and I realize that 9-11 has also affected my granddaughter's generation. She's been without her father now for half of her two years, and the first time I sang "Happy Birthday" again after that one day almost ten years ago, was last October for her first birthday.

Everyone has a day they'll never forget.  I have a feeling that when it's my time to go, no matter how old I am, and my life flashes before my eyes, I'll still see those incredible terrible pictures interspersed between all the lesser moments in my comparatively inconsequential life.  I have a feeling the rest of the country feels the same way--judging from the reaction America had to UBL's long-delayed demise.

Some days should never be forgotten. And in this country, apparently, never will be.

I guess I'm not so tough after all.  Everytime I see those videos, I still cry.  And I probably always will.

Heroism in Silence

I saw something very unusual today and I thought I'd share it with you.

My mother in law and I were on our way to lunch when we saw a whole mess of flashing lights on Memorial Drive, which is the main thoroughfare through Lancaster, Ohio which is were I live.  My mother in law, noticing that the police had blocked off the entire road, turned onto a side street, went a couple of blocks up and started on a path parallel to the one we were originally taking. We hadn't gone two blocks when a patrol car pulled into the intersection one car ahead of us, lights flashing, and stopped. 

My first thought was that there was some kind of dangerous situation. And then, I saw the first fire truck, draped with black gauze buntings and with a firefighter's protective jacket on the front grill and I knew what was happening.

On January 2, firefighters in Lancaster responded to an apartment fire. While supervising the crews battling the flames, Lt. Joseph McCafferty collapsed.  He was taken to the hospital, and eventually passed away on January 16. He was only 59. He was the first Lancaster firefighter to fall in the line of duty since the days of horse-drawn fire engines.

What we were witnessing was his funeral cortege.  And even then, it took me a few minutes to recognize the magnitude of what was happening in front of me.

The funeral procession, including the fire engine that carried Lt. McCafferty's casket, stretched a mile in length.  It was comprised of fire engines, ambulances, emergency squads and fire chiefs from all over the state of Ohio--some from as far away as Canton and Dayton. All along the funeral route, flags were lowered to half staff--not only at government facilities but also in the front yards of private citizens.

Those private citizens also lined the streets.  School kids watched in front of their schools.  Police officers who were cordoning off the route stood at attention and saluted.  The cars before and behind us all shut off their engines--and so did we.  And we all watched as fire truck after fire truck passed in front of us.  The fire chiefs in their red-painted cars looked out at us, rows of gold braid striping their sleeves.

There was a store on the left corner of these shops with a big display window, and the store employees stood in a row, witnessing the procession from indoors. And still the fire trucks kept coming.  Some of the firefighters I saw were older men, salt and peppered hair brushed back neatly.  Yet others didn't look old enough to drive much less drive a fire truck or carry people out of burning buildings.  While there were many trucks from Lancaster and I saw lots of firemen I know, the majority of them were from other counties.  They couldn't have had more than a passing acquaintanceship with Lt. McCafferty, but still they came to pay their respects to a man who'd literally given his life in the course of doing his duty.

The last time Lt. McCafferty had seen a rescue squad, he was a patient. Now they drove behind his casket to honor him. It got me thinking.  We all remember (and probably always will) the incredible courage and gallantry of the first responders in New York City on 9/11.  That bravery is now indelibly tattoed upon the men and women who serve in our fire departments or police departments all across the country, no matter where they serve.  It doesn't matter if it's in a huge metropolis like NYC or a small town like Lancaster, we still look at our first responders the same way, a way that has changed since 9/11 and strengthened our respect for the people who risk their lives in order to save ours.

Lt. Joseph McCafferty didn't die while rescuing people from a burning building.  He wasn't shot by a criminal. But still, his death is tragic.  He is not a hero for how he died.  He is a hero for how he lived.

The local newspaper, the Lancaster Eagle Gazette,  related the final tribute to Joseph McCafferty in their article this afternoon about the funeral. The 911 dispatchers sounded the tones for the fire department three times.  Three times they called for Lt. Joseph McCafferty.  Three times, they received no reply.

Finally, the dispatcher said, "For all fire personnel, this will be Lt. McCafferty's last call."

Rest in peace and good voyage to you, sir.