9-11 Pentagon

Fifteen Years…

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My 50th birthday. I was flying to New York City. To see a series of Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. And, to pop in to a special event for a youth group with which I was most active when I was young and living in New York. (Little did I know when I was a member that the organization was born the same day I was, too!)  Getting to spend a little more than 4 days enjoying this milestone birthday.

When I lived in New York, I availed myself of the wonderful arts scene. Not only did I occasionally hit Broadway, but, more often, you would find me at the Circle in the Square (then in the heart of Greenwich Village), at the American Theater (a subscription off-Broadway theater), The Atlantic, or a jumble of others. Theaters let students see plays for a most nominal fee- and I was going to school (with a full scholarship) and also had very lucrative jobs (2 of them)- so money was never really a problem. For the very first time in my life.

So, it should not be surprising that I would celebrate my birthday by revisiting Manhattan, seeing some plays, savoring great restaurants, walking the Brooklyn Bridge, and traipsing through Brooklyn Heights. It was to be a glorious celebration.

At 6:30 on Tuesday morning, I boarded my Delta Shuttle flight to home. It was now the end of the celebration. And, it seemed relatively uneventful. We landed. My friend headed to her office in DC. I walked to my car, parked at National Airport. Threw our luggage in the trunk. Headed off to my apointment.

When I saw a plane coming out of nowhere. Planes do NOT fly North from Glebe Road. This one clearly was. And, passed within a foot or two over our cars on Washington Boulevard and then slammed into the Pentagon.

9-11 Pentagon

What the F…???? I turned on the radio and heard that the World Trade Center had been hit. My daughter was calling from her school in DC saying she couldn’t reach Shanna (her older sister) at Columbia/Jewish Theological Seminary. Neither could I. It took a few seconds to recognize that the antennae that served as communications on the World Trade Center probably had failed, so there was no means to reach a cell phone in Manhattan. I told Shira to head home- now!

I maneuvered around the traffic and headed to my son’s school. The only Jewish day school in Northern Virginia, minutes from the Pentagon. I called my ex-wife and told her that I was picking Dan up and taking him to my house. She could pick him up later (this was Daniels’ week at her home), at her convenience. But he wasn’t going to be in a potential target building with all this craziness going on.

Dan and I tried to make sense of what was going on. We watched Peter Jennings of ABC. A station of which I had never been fond.  (Its news is very conservative.) But, Peter Jennings was reaching out to young kids, like my son, trying to help them make sense of this insanity. And, did a splendiferous job of explaining.

This event shook my son’s faith in many things. This- plus the divorce- made him leery of the many things going on in the adult world.

This event shook most of us up. But, it also made us more united, more in agreement than any other period of my life. My older friends said that Americans were united like we were during World War II.

But, then, we invented new enemies. We passed laws that stripped the civil rights that many of us had worked diligently to strengthen, all of which were developed to keep us free.

And, today, we are one country- but really of two minds. One group never acccepts what the other group proposes. The other group does the same. (It doesn’t help when one portion of a group invents its own facts. So, they can point to these lies (which they call facts) and claim they are “right”.

I don’t wish for another attack on America or any other civilized nation in this world. But, I do wish we could work to make this world not only terror-free, but replete with freedom for us all.

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2 thoughts on “Fifteen Years…”

  1. Great post. 9/11 was talked about so much back then that I got tired of hearing about it. Now, 15 years later (and hopefully wiser) I understand better what a defining moment this was.

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