September 11: The Perfect Awful Morning

Four years ago this morning, the morning had already started out badly. And that was just me.

I had been divorced less than a year. Dealing with the kids in the morning had not gotten any easier; One or both of them missed their buses that morning, so I'd had to haul them both in to school, then turn around and drive out to my job...

...which was an increasingly miserable exercise. It was a little dot-com that I'd been at for about a year; the experience was growing worse by the day; you could feel the place starting to roll down the long slide to oblivion, as the original ineffective management was replaced by aggressively stupid management. I had a headache that never seemed to go away.

I was listening to a P.J. O'Rourke interview on KQRS as I butted heads with the traffic on 394. The interview ended, short and light and, by O'Rourke standards, as unsatisfying as chinese appetizers at 2PM. I flipped over to MPR.

The national anchors were stammering, trying ineffectively to convey something bad. Ever the cynical ex-radio guy, I muttered "Can't ad-lib. Gotta work from a script. Stupid MPR f**ks." I was, indeed, that cynical and, I guess, jaded at the time. Chalk it up to stress, or just not being my better self on that day.

Then, as I pulled up to the office, something even they couldn't screw up; a second plane. I sat for a while in my car, flipping stations, trying to find anyone with the whole story, knowing in six-inch letters that it was war.

We sat around the office that morning, listening to radios, trying in vain to figure out what had happened, although I think we all knew.

I've mentioned it before in this space, but once more can't hurt.

The part that made me the angriest, in retrospective, was that ten years of relative sanity came to an end that morning. I grew up among the missile silos of eastern North Dakota. One of the most treasured dreams of my life came true in the nineties, when the Cold War ended and, gradually, the Minutemen were pulled from the ground and the silos decommissioned; nuclear war was so 1970. By the time my kids were born, the imminent threat of sudden, unreasoning annihilation seemed to have receded.

Of course it wasn't entirely true; annihilation suddenly and unreasonably came to people in NYC in 1993, and Oklahoma City and Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam and Saudi Arabia and to sailors in Aden and people in kibbutzes and pizza joints throughout Israel through the whole period. But against the receded threat of the deaths of millions - maybe billions - what were the dime lots in which the terrorists dealt? Against the ideology that had swallowed a hundred million lives in eighty years, what were a bunch of bearded fanatics in caves who shot women and stoned gays and massacred people in singles and threes and dozens?

I hate the trite phrase "...sending a wake-up call". But I woke up that day. And it wasn't pretty.

My son was ten years away from military age back then; today, it's six years. I'm watching it closely.