Repost

[robhansen]

A repost of an older essay of mine. Unlike so much of my previous writing, I can say there isn’t a word in here I’d change.

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Six years ago today I was in a bit of a funk in San José, California. My roommate (and for all purposes adopted brother) Doug had left just a day or two prior to move to the Minneapolis area. He and his father left with a U-Haul full of stuff. I was due to leave on September 11, moving back to Iowa. He and I were both casualties of the dot-com bust.

For those of you who don't remember it, the Bust was… “epic” is really the only word to describe it. It was a brutal, brutal time to be an engineer and to live in the Valley, or for that matter anywhere with a tech sector. I knew some places that were requiring Master’s degrees for entry-level programming positions, just to cut down on the number of applications they had to process. Doug decided to deal with the Bust by moving to Minneapolis and moving in with his fiancée (and now wife). I decided to deal with it by getting my tail back to the Midwest, where my last $10K of savings would go a lot further.

I woke up at about seven in the morning on the 11th. I yawned, tried not to notice the barrenness of the condo, walked over to my pc and turned it on. I saw that I had a sea of email greeting me, almost all of it from my foreign friends. The first message was from Roger Stenning, a friend in London.

Rob--

If you've been living under a rock, your country is at war. All of us over here are with you.

I checked cnn.com next, but it had been Slashdotted. I would’ve just turned on the television, but I gave it to Doug when he left.

So instead I went to Birk’s over in Santa Clara, one of my favorite restaurant/taverns. They weren't open at that hour of the morning, but I figured they’d let me in. They did. They had cnn on the television that was usually showing espn, and…

… For about ten minutes I, and everyone else at Birk’s, watched in utter shock and total silence. I broke it by calling over to Tony Ruiz, a barkeep there and an Army Reservist in an armor unit. I told him to break out the cheap Scotch because I wanted a ton of it. Tony gave me the bottle. As I was boozing myself into oblivion, Tony tried to be sympathetic. It was a hard thing to deal with, all right.

“No,” I told him. I was very angry with him, and for no good reason. He took it with good grace. “No, it’s not hard to deal with. Fine, ten thousand people are dead. Thirty. Fifty. Who the fuck knows? That’s … that’s a fucking blip on a population map. In five years most Americans will have stopped grieving. In ten only the directly bereaved will still remember. It’s not the deaths that are fucking with me, Tony. It’s that these poor dumb bastards just ended the world as everyone knows it, and they’re fucking ecstatic about it.”

Tony didn’t say anything. I don’t think he understood. But as I sat there and watched the Towers crumble, live on cnn, I saw the future unfold.

I’m glad to say that where we are now is better than what I foresaw.

But not by very much.

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I have little to say other than that. Losers obsess over their past defeats: winners plan how to prevail in tomorrow’s fight. Militant Islam can’t lose sight of their past humiliations, and I think we should encourage that in order to make them easier to defeat. We must lose sight of 9/11, lest we continue to sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of false safety and in the process lose the heart and soul of America.

For the sake of our future, we must forget the past — as difficult and as heartbreaking as this is.

Comments

[unixronin]

Unfortunately, one has to infer, based upon the evidence of the actions of Congress over the past ten years (if not longer), that there is significant overlap between the goals of Al-Qaeda and those of Congress.

Or, of course, I could be just cynical about Congress and government in general. Based, again, upon the evidence of their actions, which seem to be uniformly opposed to freedom.