Well, I took the subject title there form LotR and the anime Escaflowne, not that anyone really noticed.
Watched Bush's speech. uninspiring. and he kept getting this weird half-smile look everytime he stopped talking for a breath and clsoed his mouth. it was weird, and creepy, because he looked kind of blissfully glassy-eyed, like he was about to break ito a soulful, mild song full of sugary hippy love-everything-ness, or announce with a look of wistfull nostaglia that birds are pretty, aren't they?. hnheh.
read an article about the gov't's "seceret spy court" and ashcroft and surveillance warrants and civil rights. Ashcroft is scary. Secret courts are scary. 'Homeland Security' is SCARY. I read 1984, you know, and H.S. sounds a bit too much like Big Brother for me. And bush's speeches these days are like the daily 'two minutes of hate'. It's a practice in doublespeak.
Today is September 11, 2002. On September 11, 2001, two commercial ariliners ripped into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Another was aimed at the White House but foun the Pentagon in stead. The fourth crashed in a meadow in Pennsylvania, about 15 minutes from D.C. All were taken over by terrorists from the radical fundamentalists group called the Al Quaida, and within one day a man named bin Laden became the most hated face in America.
The fourth and final plane, flight 93, which like the others was headed for California, was the site of a miracle, as the passengers aboard realized the plan of the terrorists, banded together, fought the terrorists, and crashed the plane.
This remains a constant in my mind, because I'm fascinated by the idea of what transpired in the final minutes of that flight. We don't know what happened, but we can only assume that in some way it worked, because although everyone aboard died, that final jet never reached the capital city. What must the people on board have been thinking of? What strenght of character allowed them to change their fate, and to in their own way save the world--their world, the united states.
They gave the ultimate sacrifice, and its that kind of heroism that inspires me. Sacrifice and strength makes me patriotic, reminds me I'm American, not pain.
That same strenght ran through the blood of the firefighters and the police that worked, saved, and died on september eleventh and the days that followed. Hundreds of men and women died in the line of duty when the towers fell, their bodies buried in dust and steel beside the thousands they tried to rescue. My cousin's husband is a fireman, and I know from him and the people he's coem to know that only good people become firefighters, only the best souls, and they have a kind of integrity thats hard to match in other offices of public service. A corrupt fireman is something close to an impossibility.
I asked my cousin Elizabeth-- my cousin's 4 year old daughter-- what she wanted to be when she grew up. And she said she wanted to be a firefighter like her daddy. I don't think she knew about september eleventh, or everything around it. She just knew that her dad had a job that meant something, and she wanted to be that too.
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