Day 270 - 9/11

It's hard to believe that it's been nine years since the towers fell. It still seems like yesterday. This is one of those days that will be etched in my memory forever. I'll always remember a day when another teacher came into my high school English class in Fairbanks, Alaska and told us that president Kennedy had just been shot. I'll always remember a day watching a small television screen in the student union at the University of Arkansas as Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon. And I'll always remember eating breakfast in my own home and looking up at the television in the kitchen to see smoke billowing from the South tower of the World Trade center. I was watching the Today Show on NBC. At first nobody know what was happening, but it wasn't that long before a second plane flew into the North tower on live television and the world changed forever.

It was difficult to believe that what I was seeing was real. I'd been inside these buildings. I'd ridden the elevators to the roof and looked out over the New York skyline. Just a year or two before the towers fell, I remember taking a picture of them from my hotel room at the UN Plaza. It was just after sunset and the buildings were lit up and full of activity. In an instant, all that was gone.

One week after September 11, I flew to Germany on a business trip. There were lots of people with guns in all the airports and most of the passengers on the Lufthansa flight with me seemed nervous. I could tell that something had fundamentally changed, but I didn't realize just how much had changed until a long time later. Before the towers fell, I used to travel frequently on business. Now, I sit in a small room and conduct virtually all my activities over the Internet. I used to think that my career was important, but I got involved with Dalmatian Rescue shortly after September 11 and now my live is centered around dogs.

I don't really trust people anymore. I certainly don't trust politicians. I don't trust "humanists" either. Politicians are full of promises, but I don't think they really have the capacity to bring us world peace, or fix the economy. Politicians and humanists who think mankind can do anything it wants need to do some basic reading about probability theory and stochastic processes. The universe is a lot more complex and random than they'd like to believe. On days like today, I often think those people who put "Shit Happens" bumper stickers on their cars have a better grasp of how the world really works than our leaders do.

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