Sorry I've been away for so long. Life continues to get ever more complicated. We move forward, though.
I'm feeling like it's almost obligatory to talk about 9-11-01 today, but I'm also going to talk about 9-11-73, a date with a more personal connection.
Let's set the stage. Two years ago, I was in Boulder. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I walked the three miles to work to keep myself in shape and give me some personal time. On this particular Tuesday, I was leaving home a little before 7 AM when my wife said she heard something clearly preposterous on the radio. There's a fire at the World Trade Center in New York, she said. Something about an airplane hitting it. "What?" I said. "You couldn't have heard that right. Gotta go...." So I did.
About an hour later, I walked into the office and the development manager had already brought a portable TV in. Although the reception sucked (there's a reason the cable industry got started in the Colorado Rockies), clearly bad things had happened while I was roaming the bike trails of Boulder. "What's the status?" I asked Steve. "The second tower just came down, another plane hit the Pentagon, and they just got word of another plane crashed in Pennsylvania--nobody knows if that's related yet." Holy shit!
I don't really remember what project I was working on that day, but I can tell you nothing got done on it. I emailed my wife at work to tell her that if she didn't know by now, she wasn't crazy, and I would pass on info as I learned things. Then I was pretty much in shock, which would remain for the rest of the week. While the news channel websites were overwhelmed with traffic, information passed--amazingly--via email.
If you sort through the archives of the Help Authoring Tools and Techniques (HATT) list (you will not find a more useful list on this subject or a finer bunch of people) from that day, you'll see some great real-time reporting. The normally vigilant moderators cut some slack on off-topic posts for awhile as nearly everyone on this international, multicultural list was distracted by events larger than the little world of technical writing.
Eventually, the work day ended and I went home. My stepdaughter (now my landlord) was visiting with her then-new baby. They'd come out to Boulder on Labor Day for a few days of showing off the baby to the grandparents. Suddenly, plans had changed rather dramatically. But the television never got turned off. We'd change channels every once in awhile, but I couldn't take my eyes off it. I hardly slept the whole week, except when Bush gave his big speech to Congress, when I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. Didn't make a very good first impression on my granddaughter. Whenever I was home, I was lying on the couch watching TV, too tired to entertain the poor little girl in the portable car seat. She likes me, now, though.
Once the airlines were functioning again, for some reason <g> my daughter still didn't want to fly back home to Milwaukee. She was actually able to con her sister-in-law to drive out and bring them back at the end of September! I am grateful we had that time together.
As for today, aside from listening to NPR, I stayed away from the commemorations. They only tend to piss me off. I still choke up whenever I see the footage, as with the Ric Burns documentary that ran on PBS Monday. It still startles me. It remains absolutely preposterous, but it still happened.
Now about 9-11-73. Thirty years ago today, one of Henry Kissinger's fondest wishes came true. "No country should be allowed to go communist through the irresponsibility of its own people," he once said. This referred to Chile's election of Salvador Allende as its president. On September 11, 1973 the Chilean military seized power, murdered Allende and thousands of others who dared to support him. Among those taken to the National Stadium was a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad student, Adam Schesch. He was beaten severely, but managed to get out with the help of Wisconsin's congressional delegation. I met and worked with Adam some 20 years later in the Wisconsin Labor-Farm Party and AFSCME Council 24. We don't always agree on things, but his courage is undeniable. You can read a little of his story in this appropriately titled Marc Cooper piece from LA Weekly.
May we continue to mourn the dead of BOTH 9-11s, and those who have died since. Let there be no more innocent victims.
8:01:00 PM 
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