4279 - 9/11

It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since the towers fell. So much has changed and yet nothing has changed. I still sit at the same kitchen table where I watched the days events unfold that fateful morning. The kitchen TV is a modern flatscreen now, but it still sits on top of the same indestructible old Toshiba microwave. Spot had died in June of 2001 and I don't think we'd gotten Petey yet. We had just started getting involved with Dalmatian Rescue. I was still working and was very busy. I remember flying to Germany to work on an ad campaign for Siemens a few weeks after 9/11 and feeling that the world had changed forever.

We flew an American flag in front of our house for the rest of the year. Most of our neighbors did too. The country seemed united in a way that seems impossible today. There was a lot of fear in those early days.  I remember buying gas masks after the anthrax scare. They probably wouldn't have done any good, but they made us feel better for a week or so. Everybody was in favor of going to Afghanistan and kicking the Taliban's ass in those early days. It wasn't until we went to Iraq and completely ignored Saudi Arabia, which was always the elephant in the room, that people started having second thoughts about wars in the Middle East. Nobody would have ever believed that we would end up handing Afghanistan back to the very same Taliban twenty years later.

I wonder if we have learned anything during the past twenty years. The world is more of a mess than it ever was and our own country is hopelessly divided. Janet and I used to travel a lot and loved spending time in Paris and Barcelona. I can't think of a single major city where I'd feel safe anymore. I never could have predicted twenty years ago that my favorite place would now be a lonely mountaintop in West Texas. 

I used to go to New York frequently to edit television commercials. I had a lot of free time and visited the Wall Street area several times. Once I took the elevator to the observation deck on top of the South Tower. I took today's picture from the window of my room at the UN Plaza. I never ate at Windows of the World because I was young and couldn't afford it. Those times seem so long ago now. It's almost like I was living in a different universe.

Now I'm retired and would love to live in a world that made sense again. Lots of luck with that. I still think the primary problem is globalism. You can't just take hundreds of different cultures that have developed over thousands of years and just mix them all together. It doesn't work that way. I look for clues in the animal kingdom, but even ducks can be mean and nasty. Humans never were very nice and probably never will be. We have big brains but we'll never last as long as the dinosaurs. We'll probably do something stupid and be extinct in 300 years.

On days like today we always resolve to never forget. We do forget though. Often way too quickly. History is littered with momentous events we've totally forgotten about. I'm not looking for miracles here. I'd just like ten good years with no major problems. OK, let's be optimistic about my long walks. How about fifteen years?

Shadow is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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