Twenty years ago I woke up in Los Angeles and began my morning ritual. I’m a creature of habit and in those days my habit was to go directly to the bathroom and turn on, first the shower, and then my shower radio. It was tuned to 97.1 FM in those days, the station that hosted Howard Stern.
The first words I heard when the radio came on were Robin Quivers saying something like “One of the World Trade Centers just collapsed.”
When I heard those words I had a very intense flashback to 1993. I was working in the news department of my college radio station in ’93 and I was alone in the control room when the AP wire… it was literally a dot matrix printer spitting out news items all day… printed the story of the bombing of the Trade Centers. At the time I had an image in my mind of the WTC keeling over and collapsing on lower Manhattan. When I got back to my apartment and saw the reality, I felt pretty stupid. “Of course the WTC could never fall down”, I thought.
And so, 8 years later, I brushed off Robin’s comment thinking it must be a similar situation. When I walked out of the bathroom a few minutes later, my roommate had the TV on and the awful reality of the situation became clear. This time the towers really had fallen. Then the phone rang, it was my mom saying she had not heard from my brother who was working in DC. He turned out to be OK but it was hours before we knew for sure.
I’m not sure that, after 20 years, I have anything new to add to the story of 9/11, except to say this. My blog (and other versions of this blog that I’ve hosted in the past) has always looked at current events from a Prepping and Self-Reliance point of view. When the shit truly hits the fan, we all need to realize that we are on our own. “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away” as the saying goes. No one is coming to save us and we must always be prepared to save ourselves… or worse…
Every 9/11 I like to point out that despite a trillion dollar Military, Intelligence, and National Defense apparatus, the only successful counterattrack on 9/11 was mounted by a group of civilians who did not know each other, and who woke up that morning not knowing that they would soon be in a battle for their lives and for the lives of their fellow Americans.
If they had known they probably would have said that they didn’t know if they were ready. But when the bell rang, they answered it, organizing on the fly a highly effective counterattack with limited information and no weapons at their disposal. I can only hope that if I’m ever in a life-or-death situation, that I can find a way to react as decisively as they did.
That’s the lesson I took away from that Day. There are others, for sure, but that lesson is the one that resonates with me the most and which guides my attitude towards the unknown dangers we face every day as Free Americans.
20 years later, that is the enduring legacy of 9/11 for me.