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Whew...

Sept. 11, 2001

Today was a very bad day. My second day of work at Press Ganey. I walked in, quickly found a solution to a problem I was working on the night before, and moved on to working on those custom dialog boxes. After a while, I started overhearing things from outside my cubicle.

"A plane crashed into the..."

"Can't get cnn.com to come up."

"News sites are hosed..."

Like many, I assumed someone flying a Cessna went out of control and hit one of the towers. However, I wanted to see some news for myself. So, I tried to pull up one of these news sites on my own. Of course, I had no chance, since they had already all died. Instead, I tried slashdot, which usually doesn't carry that kind of news, but I thought maybe this was big enough to make it on there. It was. By this time, two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. And not just little Cessnas. Big suckers. Jumbo jets. I was shocked. There was no question by that point that it was a terrorist attack. There is no way two planes could each accidently hit the WTC, one for each tower. I was shocked. I read all the comments posted on the topic.

By now, the office was much more active. Someone was trying desperately to get a radio up, while our sysadmin was trying to get at least one of the major news sites working. Work completely stopped. Finally, we found out that the towers had collapsed. I was completely shocked. Not only had terrorists managed to hijack planes and ram them into a major landmark, they actually succeeded in completely destroying it. I almost lost it when I saw the pictures. My mind raced as I contemplated the implications of this new event. Would there be a war? What is my country going to do? I couldn't guess. The world seemed to be going along so nicely. Sure, there were those problems in the middle east, but they had always been there. Our economy was a little shaky, but nothing serious. Things were bound to get better.

Boom. I desperately hope that this is the most significant tragedy my generation will face. It seems we are doomed to fight a faceless, cowardly, country-less foe. One who values nothing - not his life, not the lives of others, not peace, nothing except his own hatred for us. One of the more upsetting things to me is the realization that we, as a country, are going to have to kill people now. Possibly many. I hate that prospect. I hate it when our country kills. I hate it when we kill our own citizens through the death penalty, and I hate it when we kill those in other countries in war or other military action. But these terrorists have now made it impossible for us to do otherwise. They would do well to heed the words of Japanese WWII Admiral Yamamoto, "I fear that we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve." The full might of the US Armed Forces will now be focused on finding and wiping out the terrorists. Even if I decide that I agree with this policy, one thing is for sure, I will be stained with their blood.

Maybe I'm too young to understand. Or maybe I've grown up in a society which is too secure and too prosperous, but I cannot conceive of an evil so great, a hatred so consuming, that it would drive men to commit these sorts of atrocities. And to do without any sense of honor or valor. Even Hitler and Stalin, arguably to of the most evil masterminds of the 20th Century, found it better to face their enemies with open hostility. I pray for the souls of the victims of this terrible act and their families, for the terrorists who committed it, and for the American soldiers who will soon face them and surrender part of their humanity to protect the rest of us.

In an attempt to regain some of my sanity, I spent some time today building a multimedia archive of some of today's footage. I don't have cable TV, so I grabbed these off of various web sites. I posted some pictures of the crumbling towers as well as a collection of audio and video clips from news services.