9.11

It feels inappropriate to blog about anything except 9.11 today. I don't care how many times I see the image of jetliners flying into the twin towers, I still can not believe what I have just seen. It was that disbelief on the live broadcast, and is still the same gut-wrenching feeling when I watch reruns. People jumping from a burning inferno. The stunned look on onlookers faces. Every heartbreaking second of that morning lives in my eyes, seered into my memory that I wish I could forget. We are all changed by that day. More fearful of strangers, more alert, more paranoid, we joined the rest of world in being targets of manaics bent on their jihad of hate and destruction.

What I hate to see and hated to see in the afermath of 9.11 was the way we treated our own Muslim communities, Arabic citizens, people of color, who spoke another language, any language suddenly became the enemy, object of suspicion. That was just as gut-wrenching as watching airplanes explode into the side of a building. And of course, then there was the propaganda of this adminstration constantly mentioning Iraq, Osama Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussien, 9.11 all in the same sentence over and over and over again until many Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9.11. The next tragedy was the U.S. getting involved in Iraq, losing focus on Afghanistan, Osama and the Taliban.

But I digress. My thoughts and prayers are with families and friends who lost loved ones on that day. For our majestic country. For brave NYFD and NYPD. For all the poor souls who boarded flights that day, thinking it was an ordinary day.