BlitzBlog

It was a gorgeous morning. Crisp. Clear. I'd gotten to work a little early, around 8:30 and was sitting in my co-worker Gary's office bs'ing. Another co-worker Judy, whose office is across the hall from Gary's, had just arrived at work. She put her belongings on her desk and came in and said, “Something fucked-up is going on. A plane just hit the World Trade Center. I just heard it on the radio.” Judy is a bit more worrisome than I, so I assuanged her with, “Oh it's probably just some idiot pilot in a Cessna. Jeez it was bound to happen sooner or later. It's happened to the Empire State Building a few times.” She shrugged and went to her office.
I got up and went to mine and went to the CNN website on my computer. I figured this would be a good story.
I don't recall the details, but the “breaking news” story mentioned the possiblity that it was a much larger plane than some small private one that an inexperienced pilot might be flying. While I was intrigued, I started to do my work for the day.
About 10 more minutes went by, and I heard Judy down the hall again. “This is fucked UP! Something's going ON!” I got up and went down the hall. “What's up?” I asked.
“Another plane hit the Trade Center!” she answered.
“Holy shit, ” I thought, “Now something IS fucked up.” I walked around the office and to see if anyone had a radio or TV on. Someone had a radio going and I stood there listening to sketchy reports. Nobody in the media truly knew what had happened. What they did know was that both towers were now on fire and that police and firefighters were on the scene.
We had a TV on a cart that we brought into one of owner's offices, which was hooked up only to a VCR, but by about 9:45 we found some rabbit ear antennae and turned it on. The only local station we could receive was CBS Channel 2 in New York. Apparently they were one of the only stations who broadcast from the Empire State Building and not from the WTC. With the WTC in flames, all the other stations were essentially off the air.
The screen showed a shot from uptown, looking south at the burning towers. The camera was at least 4 miles from the site, but we could see clearly that both buildings were totally engulfed in smoke from about the 80th floor on up.
I saw how messed up the situation was, went back to my office and tried calling home. Unfortunately it was my wife's first day working at a local pre-school, and she didn' t have a cell phone, so I had no idea if she knew what was going on, or if my kids in school (kindergarten and third grade) knew either.
I went back to the TV and watched the buildings burn. At just before 10 o'clock, I saw something that I just couldn't believe was happening. I watched the south tower begin to collapse, and I could hear a few audible gasps and “Oh my gods” in the room. Nobody could comprehend what we were witnessing. I booked back to my office to try to track down Kate, again with no success.
By now the TV analysts are speaking of terror attacks in Washington also, and that fighters have been scrambled and that the FAA has ordered all commenrcial flights to land immediately.
In my mind, I'm trying to sort things out. I'm a bit ashamed to admit this now, but the thought crossed my mind at the time, that the company I work for is owned by Iranians, and that by some convoluted logic, the building I was in could be a bad place to be on this day. I had no clear reasoning behind this thought, but it was present in my mind.
I went back to the TV and got there just as the second tower collapsed. At first I thought I was seeing a replay of the first tower's collapse, but the I saw niether tower, only smoke and sky. I silently mouthed “Oh my God.” and walked quietly back to my office. I sat down heavily and began thinking about what to do next. All I could think was that this could be the beginning of a much greater series of Bad Events. And then I thought, “Get home.”
I grabbed my keys and headed quietly for the door. I stopped to tell our Human Resources Director that I was going home, and that I'd speak to here later. She said she understood and said “Good luck.”
Traffic was no different on the road. Only my own sense of urgency to get the 40 miles to my house without incident was what was unusual. About 20 miles from work, there is a hill in Ramsey, NJ on Route 17 where, on a normal day on my way into work, I can see the enitre skyline of Mahattan. Today, I can see a crowd of cars and people along the side of the road and in the parking lots on this hill, all staring over my shoulder at the skyline, with the immense plume of smoke billowing at its southern end. I want to stop and stare too, but the pull of seeing my family, and the survivalist instinct that tells me to put as much distance betwen New York and myself, is stronger. I drive on.
I head to my house, which is empty, so I drive to the pre-school, where about half the parents have already picked their kids up early. With only a few kids left to oversee, and with the pre-school only 1//4 mile from our house, Kate tells me to go home and wait for our kids to get off the bus. Apparetly there's no early dismissal or anything unusual about this day in our school system. The authorities have decided to let parents take their kids out early on an individual basis, but in an effort to keep things calm, they have tried to keep things at school as normal as possible.
My wife had arrived home not long after I did, and we sat there numbly watching the whole horrible day unfold.
Sarah was in kindergarten, so her bus got home first. I quizzed here about what she knew, and as a 6 year old, she only knew sketchy details that really didn't seem to bother her. I fed her a snack and sent her to the playroom to keep herself occupied.
My son arrived home a few hours later. As a third grader, he knew the WTC had been attacked, but he didn't seem too concerned. It was just another news story to him. We went to the living room and he sat down to watch the news with me. He got very quiet watching the replays of what had unfolded that morning, but after a while he became bored and headed to the playroom also.
I knew that the world had changed that day. For me, I began to think of people I knew who might have been at the WTC that day. Luckily I could think of only a few, and I made some calls to check on their welfare. Thankfully, no one I was close with had been harmed in the attacks.
I stayed close to my family that day

Saw an interview with former Israeli Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu last night. His take on the whole Lebanon/Hizbollah war was that Israel is not fighting Lebanon or Hizbollah. Israel is fighting the foremost regiment of the Iranian army. Hizbollah is trained by/in Iran. They use Iranian money and Iranian weapons.
Why would Iran want to fight Israel at this particular time? besides the obvious fact of anti-Zionism, they needed a diversion of the world's attention away from their rapidly developing nuclear program. while Kofe Annan and the rest of the world is bemoaning the poor poor Lebanese, the pressure is now off of Iran while it goes ahead with its nuclear program.
While Netanyahu did not come out and say it, I get the distinct feeling that Israel would have no problem bombing the bejeezus out of Iran as soon as they have the targeting intelligence information. There is historical precedent here for Israel doing so. They bombed an almost-finished nuclear reactor in Bahgdad in 1981 when they saw that Saddam was getting close to realizing his dream of harnessing the atomic bomb, so it doesn't seem so unlikely that they'd do the same now. Especially in light of all the belligerent rhetoric that has come from the mullahs of Iran, and of course their deployment of their proxy in Lebanon, Hizbollah.
Should be interesting times in the Middle East for a while.

An un-named relative of mine was opining the plight of the poor Lebanese people and how horrific and out-of-proportion the Israeli barrage on Lebanon was. BTW, she's Jewish.
I wanted to smack her.
Does not she realize that the only reason those “poor poor Lebanese” were being bombed back into the 70s was because for the last 6 years, since the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, those poor poor Lebanese allowed their country to become a Hizbollah stronghold? They allowed these extremist terrorists to live among them and allowed them to become the most dominant force of Law in their own country. They allowed them to dig bunkers and import ten thousand rockets from Iran and Syria. They allowed these fundamentalist zealots to live among them, and to set up their bomb factories and rocket lauchers in their neighborhoods. Near homes. Near schools. They did not demand their own government do something to stop this. They did not write their newspapers, or argue in the streets. They just allowed it to happen.
Did not 18 years of Israeli occupation teach those poor poor Lebanese anything? That the very reason Israel's army was occupying their nation was specifically because Lebanon had been a terrorist stronghold and the Israelis knew that the only way to keep the terrorists out of Lebanon was if they (the Israelis) did it themselves? The previous generation of terrorists - Yassir Arafat's PLO- was based, throughout the 70s, in southern Lebanon. After a decade of attacks and bombings and raids on northern Israel, in 1982, the Israeli Defense Forces marched into Lebanon and occupied it until 2000. Arafat was chased to Muhamar Khadafy's Libya (remember when ol' Muhamar was a terrorist? Remember that Pan Am wreckage lying across a mile of Lockerbie Scotland, with 300+ bodies strewn about? If not, ask Muhamar. I'm sure he can tell you all about it, over a couple of puffs on the houkah in his tent). Anyway, so Arafat winds up in Libya for a few years.
Why Libya?
Because none of the other Arab nations will have him. The Arab nations all hate Arafat and his bedraggled Palestinian people.
And so after 9 years “in exile,” Yassir returns to his Palestinian homeland after the Israelis and he sign the Oslo Accords. In 1991, mind you. The Israelis agree to recognize the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people while the PLO recognized the right of the state of Israel to exist and renounced terrorism, violence and its desire for the destruction of Israel.
With this foundation laid, Israeli slowly withdrew from Lebanon, until the last IDF troops left in 2000.
About a half hour after that, Syria and Iran began shipping short range rockets to their new representatives in Lebanon. Apparently, the duly recognized representatives of the Palestinian people were able to strike a deal towards eventual self-governance, but Israel's neighbors couldn't abide Israel's presence in their midst.
So through their proxy's, using religious fundamentalist zealotry as a means to an end, Syria and Iran (not even an Arab country mind you. Yes Iran is Persian, not Arab, and has a long history of a thriving Jewish commuinty within its borders, until of course, 1979 when the evil mullah's siezed power. Then the Jews all fled or were slaughtered).
But I digress.
So the “poor poor Lebanese” are now having their country rebuilt, $10,000 US dollars at a time. This cash is being distributed by Hizbollah members to everyone who shows up and claims to have a destroyed home. Hizbollah is becoming, in the public's eye, the Great Rebuilder of the country. The poor poor Lebanese do not realize the fact that the very people from whom they are so deleriously taking money are the very reason they have no homes in the first place.
What the poor poor Lebanese should be doing is taking the cash and then shooting the giver, executuion style. This way they can actually rebuild their country, both physically and politically. But as long as Hizbollah is the dominant political and now, capital, force in thier country, there will continue to be warfare waged along and within their southern border, and that they'll be rebuilding their newly rebuilt houses again and agan for as long as they allow the root cause of the destruction to live amongst them.
It is time for the poor poor Lebanese to assert themselves as the “thinking” Arabs they have always professed to be. If Beirut is ever to rightly reclaim its status as the “Paris of the middle East” then it's inhabitants better start acting like civilized Europeans Can you imagine Belgians citizens, or even the French, sitting idly by while some religious nutcase moved into the cottage next door and started building a concrete bunker on his property? Do you think they might call the authorities? (Hell don't the Lebanese have building codes? I can't even put up a tool shed without a permit.) Or would they sit idly by like the Lebanese? The poor poor Lebanese had better realize that if they want to live in peace, they had better do something about the foreigners who are bringing an unwanted war into their country.
They have reaped what they've sown, and deservedly so.