Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
God help them.
The jumpers were, maybe, the first of the truths “they” instantaneously erased from History. The first casualty in war is truth.
I will try to hear on TV the names of a dozen or so wonderful people who I had known for years; and say a little prayer.
T. Shaw
Not at all to take anything away from the deceased or their families, but a little bit of each of us died with them that unimaginable morning. It feels as though it was only yesterday.
May each of the innocent rest in eternal peace.
We died with them, just a bit.
I’ll keep this brief. After watching the news, just after the second plane hit the other tower, I felt compelled to walk to St. Henry’s parish. It’s
several blocks from our home in Watertown Wisconsin. I recall praying before our Lord in the Tabernacle, then stepped outside at about noon.
Walked through a park and noticed how the skies we’re absent of air travel. Watertown is located underneath a busy flight corridor.
No vapor trails.
It just all seemed to be a strange calm that dreadful morning.
Then the gasoline lines started to form at our local stations.
Remembering 9/11/01 on my day off.
I was in boot camp.
The master at arms had a dental appointment and she came in and dragged the leader off to one side, most of us couldn’t hear it but got the ghist of Something Really Bad. Then our RDC (drill instructor, Navy style) came in and told us to shut up and get ready for inspection. We failed horribly.
He’d known for hours but didn’t want to tell us about it at all.
The lowest ranking RDC snuck in a week-in-review tape so we’d be able to find out what had happened.
Nobody in our division lost anybody- although the Catholic RPO’s dad hurt his leg getting a secretary out of the Pentagon, he’s a Lutheran Army pastor– but a guy in the division across the hall had a family restaurant in the first tower. His mom happened to be sent out to pick up supplies before opening, but everyone else…..
I wasn’t anywhere special that day. Wasn’t a hero. Didn’t witness anything except on the TV. I was living in CA. i wasn’t even up early enough to see it live.
It still changed everything for me. Three days later, I went to church for a Mozart requiem, my first time in decades of being in a church. I realized I lot more, too, about my life and where it led, and what the world needed me to do for the good of civilization.
I know this day isn’t about me, but they died for me, too. Alter Christus, ipsus Christus, their sacrifice saved me. I am still angry and grief filled, but also so grateful to those who died for saving me. I cannot repay them.
“I wasn’t anywhere special that day. Wasn’t a hero. Didn’t witness anything…
“….my first time in decades of being in a church..”
Alice.
Please pardon my observation but I see a great heroine in you.
You were moved back to the Truth.
You are a great part of the fruit of this tragic event.
God be with you.
Stay with the faithful.
They are counting on you to be the next gift for others.. because they didn’t loose their life in vain ..your visit to church in many months away from church is proof.
Amazing Grace dear soul.
Peace.
And
Love.
Philip.
I can’t help but remember how willing people were to accept more government surveillance, more internal spying, in the aftermath. “We may be more and more like East Germany, but at least we’ll be safe!” And of course there were all kinds of stories about plots to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge (a favorite among rumor-mongers), which our friends in the government had narrowly saved us from. Of course, they never really did find who started sending the anthrax in the mail; their description of the “white box truck” used by the D.C. sniper turned out to be completely imaginary; and the terrorist attacks that failed — the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, Faisal Shahzad trying to set off a car bomb in Times Square, etc. — failed due to the stupidity of the terrorists and/or the actions of civilians, not government precautions, but people still were thankful to Uncle Sam. Maybe invading Iraq had somehow magically helped; at least that’s what we hear constantly from PSA’s and merchants who want to sound patriotic. Meanwhile, our government is daily more like the Eastern European model we once risked nuclear annihilation to avoid, and the public has largely forgotten the incident that pushed us to accept this “new normal”.
It was my son’s 19th birthday. My husband was in Manhattan at an engineering firm discussing a bomb blast reflective material for building facades. Ironic. While waiting for the briefing in a conference room they watched the second plane fly into tower #2. Since it was our younger son’s 19th birthday my husband had a reserved seat on the train to be back in DC for birthday dinner. There was no cell service to NYC so I called the office in Crystal City. The answerer explained the nearby Pentagon had been hit so all buildings in that area were being evacuated. He was last man out but assured me my husband was ok. Some of my friends husbands stationed in the Pentagon weren’t so lucky.
Prayers for those in service to our country who have worked and continue to work 24/7 saving us from a repeat of 9/11.
Howard-
In just my area, there was an attempted Christmas Tree lighting bombing, which was stopped by the Feds. There were at least two attempts at the Space Needle, both stopped by the Feds. And those are just the cases that they couldn’t keep quiet, since broadcasting how you stop stuff is a really stupid security move– amazing how all three of those were only regionally reported, and vanished from the news quickly, isn’t it? Almost like how defensive gun uses get swept under the rug, or how the attempted massacre of the Republican reps is hardly mentioned at all, while school shootings from when I was a kid are still brought up. So long as it’s useful.
The Golden Gate bridge is a favorite rumored target because it has all the traits that make it a good target– you pull off in the wrong spot near any target and there will be a cop showing up in about two minutes. (They generally turn on their lights so you don’t get hit on the side of the road, and help you get back on the road if something has gone wrong– does good if you’re just a person, and will really ruin your day if you’re trying to case the place.)
The gov’t at any level or all of them isn’t magic, and like the old saying goes the best swordsman fears the worst more than the second best, because when someone is flatly incompetent you have no idea what they’re going to do. That leaves civilians as the last line of defense, and “I cannot believe anybody would do something that stupid” as a hole in our armor.
Maybe invading Iraq had somehow magically helped; at least that’s what we hear constantly from PSA’s and merchants who want to sound patriotic.
Where on earth are you hearing that? Because I get nothing but slagged for pointing out that Saddam was a glowing example that you could violate agreements five ways from Sunday and we would just take it, which in ME culture means you are too weak to do anything, which was likely to be a big recruiting point for those attacking us. I have to repeatedly prove that we DID find WMDs, that we have disabled vets from IEDs made with the things, and that we don’t know what was in the convoys that left Iraq before we arrived– although we did find a few of them. Buried in the desert. With the executed drivers still in the front seat.
Pretty obvious that they wanted to get something into Syria and didn’t want to leave an information trail.
***************
This is an old list, but here are 50 that made the news:
https://www.heritage.org/terrorism/report/fifty-terror-plots-foiled-911-the-homegrown-threat-and-the-long-war-terrorism
Thx for the info Foxfier, and the ongoing fight about the WMDs. That is tiresome to try and deal with.
Very tiring– especially since the goal posts tend to move. First there’s no WMDs, then they were ones we already knew about (duh, right in the declaration of reasons is that the stuff we knew he had he was moving around where he wasn’t allowed to), then that we can’t prove if they were NEW WMDs, and then eventually that only nukes are WMDs.
Which would be hella news to the marsh-Arabs that Saddam wiped out with gas.
One of the AOs at my A-school in the Navy (first round of training for a technical field) wanted to know why we hadn’t declared war on Saddam yet. She was an artist, married to a doctor, who bought her a great studio…which had a wonderful view of the second plane hitting. She’d signed up in the Navy the next day. She had a New Yorker magazine with a heck of a write-up on the genocide.
She’d graduated by the time we did set in to get rid of Saddam, so I don’t know what she thought of it….