Reflections

September 11, 2001 was a day that irreversibly shifted the worldview of just about every American that was old enough to understand what happened. Sitting in my office space almost 10 years later, I find it not just a little difficult to focus on the daily tasks for which I am paid to perform. Since the announcement last night, I have been flooded with decade old feelings and memories.

Fear. Loathing. Helplessness. Anger. And the images. Oh, the images. There weren't that many visuals to broadcast, so we kept seeing the same ones over and over and over again.

Similar to this very morning, I got to the office earlier than usual on that day, before 8:00 AM. Less than an hour later, the 3rd floor was abuzz and had nothing to do with selling mortgages. Eventually, I was able to catch the word hijacked from the other side of the wall and was horrified at what I found on the CNN homepage.

In 2001, there was still very little in the way of live streaming of audio or video via the web. I spent about an hour reading and refreshing my browser. Click. Read. Previous. Refresh. Over and over again. By the time of the Pentagon strike, there was absolutely no way I would be working even one more minute on that day and left.

Inevitably, I tuned the radio in the car to the news station and was greeted with the news of a fourth known jet and reports of several more. The news outlets were blindly reporting every nugget of information they came across, most of which would never be retracted. The cumulative and net effect on me was, however, non-retractable. The damage was done.

I was familiar, academically of course, with terrorism. Hijackings were chiefly hostage taking operations in order to achieve some other goal. Now, after decades of playing for increasingly larger sized pots, the jihadists went all-in. (see what I did there? this used to be a poker blog, after all)

All I wanted to do was be as close to my wife and 11 week old daughter as possible. We laid in bed together, my wife and I in horror at what continued to be reported on tv, our daughter between us, blissfully ignorant of anything other than being near mommy. When she was born, exactly 11 weeks prior, she spent 14 days in the NICU while fighting persistant pulmonary hypertension. During those 2 weeks, I had no doubts that everything would be ok. Just over 2 months later, I knew that nothing would be ok again.

It actually took a week before the nightmares started. I thought I had managed to avoid them but I guess, eventually, my brain needed an outlet to purge the badness that was accumulating in there. Needless to say, I slept quite poorly for about 4 nights in a row. Looking back, some of the dreams were actually fairly comical, though disturbing at the time. In one, a 747 came crashing through my grandparents' house in Northeast Philly. Why that house? I'll never understand my subconscious.

Anyway, what was the point? Here we are 10 years later and I feel like the killing of Osama bin Laden is nothing more than the tying up of one loose end while the whole damn thing is still unraveling. For now, it is a not-so-subtle reminder of what happened on that day and how great our country became in the aftermath. If we can hold on to that for a little while, I will happily accept the painful memories that have returned from exile.

Unfortunately, I think that the mission (brilliantly carried out by our military and intelligence, btw) will be quickly politicized and spun into talking points. For now, we got him, good for us, but there are actually a few (thousand) more important things for us, as Americans, to focus on. Let's see if we can get anything accomplished before the current zeitgeist inevitably wanes.

I won't hold my breath.

And there go another 5 minutes of your life you're not getting back...