I already had been aware of the historic hit by a lost B-25 of the Empire State Building, that there had been clouds, they’d been unable to see, that it had been a legit ACCIDENT.
And so when I heard over the radio of the first hit, I thought, good God, it has gone and happened again, how puzzling that their GPS didn’t manage to help them out.
And I assumed at first it had been a small twin-engine private aircraft, etc.
I immediately thought of that old B-25 from WW2.
“We are AT WAR..!”
Even though it was finally clear it was a terror attack, I was still THEN dubious at the notion that the USA was really at war:
That was melodrama, I thought.
Yet in time it was clear that first impulse was CORRECT —the USA was in fact at war.
“If we let the terrorists change the way we live EVEN A LITTLE BIT, then THEY WIN..!”
I heard that assertion a million times, injected even for stupid, trifling things.
Yet in fact the way we live HAS UTTERLY AND TOTALLY CHANGED, perhaps forever.
They do NOT envy our booz, our bikini beaches, our Universities, crowded and finally now dominated by women.
We CANNOT re-create the American mid-West in the Middle-East and we should NEVER try to, not even a little bit:
Let us guard our OWN immigration, our OWN borders, and let them play in sand, dirty, disease and illiteracy.
My first thought when I heard it was “Pilots should not drink and drive”.
Then I realized I was in my office high up in a glass tower in another city—and then learned it was not a drunk pilot.
Gulp.