12 years on.

Well, here we are at the 12th year since the terrorist attacks on 9/11.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that you can read three regular features here.  This is one of them.

A lot of cliches get tossed around on a day like this, like "it was a day like any other", and "on that day, ordinary people became heroes".  Both of those statements are true, but nevertheless the imagery of that day lives on in those who were witnesses, either on-site or like me, by television of that horrific Tuesday in September 2001.

The image pictured above is the one that I will remember the most.  In Tulsa, I was en route to work when our part of the country was informed of the first plane impact.  This image is about a half-second before I clocked on at the electrical supply warehouse I was working at in September 2001.  The live image that we saw on the TV in the sales counter area of the warehouse was slightly different, but I remember the reactions from our customers and from my co-workers; A mixture of horrified gasps, a few expletives muttered, but absolute stunned silence.

My parents were able to tell you what they were doing when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.  That was one of the tragic moments of their generation.  Like 9/11, they spoke about the event like people do with 9/11 in terms of life before and life after the event.  Life before is almost always much better and more innocent than life afterward.  Such is the case about 9/11.  I stated in an earlier blog entry that I have taken meticulous steps to remember every detail about that day, which effectively erased the two prior tragic events of my life prior to 9/11--the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion in 1986 and the bombing of the Murrah Building in 1995.

Those events will never go away but they almost seem minor in terms of the scale of 9/11.  The other two days of tragedy in my life did not shut down all air travel in the country, nor were they situations that put the safety of the President in jeopardy.  9/11 had both of those and so much more.  

While the big events were happening on the eastern seaboard, one way or the other the whole country was involved.  The warehouse where I worked was in the pattern for Tulsa International and the utter quiet in the sky after commercial flights were grounded was almost deafening. More than once it crossed my mind that all the doomsday scenarios that had been tossed at us over the years was coming true at last.  

I was a teenager when it seemed like all of the TV networks at one time or the other were obsessed with producing global war movies that involved the middle of the country being attacked and obliterated, and here it was happening.  Of course the difference was that there was no buildup of military forces or all the dramatic elements leading up to the attack like in the movies.  During the coverage we were watching after my parents and I got back home after work it crossed my mind more than once that World War III might start after I went to bed.

Thank God it didn't happen.

Next year, we will be back here remembering.  Imagery will be presented once again and then like every other year it will all be over.  

And I will write another blog about it.