Fifteen Years Ago The World Changed Forever...

For me and many others, tomorrow, September 11, 2016 will recall the horror of the day fifteen years ago when nineteen Islamic terrorists filled with hate and bloodlust flew suicide missions at the behest of their Al Queda leader into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a failed attempt that crashed into a remote field in Pennsylvania.

For any American old enough for cognizant memory at the time, it is a day and a moment one cannot forget; when time stood still and we were all witness to the very depths of evil unfolding right in front of us in real time on the news media everywhere.  

Around the country, and in a lot of places around the world, buildings started to immediately close down and businesses sent employees home with the admonition to be careful and safe.  Schools also closed as frantic parents rushed to pick up their children to hold them and perhaps try to explain the madness they were seeing and hearing about.  No one knew what else might be coming, the entire Air Traffic Control function in the US shut down and as a result, much of the other world air traffic ground to a screeching halt.  All planes in the air within or approaching US airspace; be they commercial or private, were ordered to land at the nearest airport and wait for the clearance that would ultimately take many days.  The skies completely emptied and except for the military, no planes could arrive or depart from any airport anywhere.  Any pilot that might have attempted to ignore that order would have certainly been rightly subject to being shot down.  

I was in my office just south of Boston when the first plane hit and I remember thinking that maybe it was some sort of freak accident reminiscent of the time a plane hit the Empire State Building.  By the time I rationalized my thinking to the weather conditions present during that incident and the time of day when it occurred against the picture perfect day we were having, the second plane struck, and I realized like the rest of America that we were under attack and at war.  Certainly, whoever did it was at war with us.  I called home to wake up my son, explained that we were at war, and to turn on the television.

During the rest of the day, we all witnessed people jumping to their deaths rather than face the flames and having no way out.  Confusion reigned and it seemed that all at once we were hearing about other planes on the way to other places, we watched the towers fall, heard the subsequent recordings of the NYFD and NYPD calls of which many would become last words.  We heard the eerie sound of all the downed firefighter alarms going off; and we didn’t even have a moment to catch our breath before the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, with yet another not responding and being tracked. 

New York area hospitals geared up expecting countless injuries and deaths.  In the end, the death toll was just shy of 3000 and the injured, while numerous, were not as many as initially expected; which many owed to the relatively early hour of the attacks.  Had the planes struck the WTC perhaps even a half hour or so later, the death and injury toll would likely have been exponentially more, as many more would have reported for work by then.

In the ensuing days, weeks, and months after the attack, we watched as the area, which was treated as a crime scene, was sifted through bit by bit in the search for remains of the deceased and parts of the planes.  

We watched as previous strangers worked together, hand to hand, to clean up the often putrid mess, and we heard the usual endless bloviating of politicians as to the remedy.  To this day, the death toll related to this cowardly attack rises.  Every time I hear of a firefighter, police officer, or civilian finally succumbing to maladies contracted as a result of that day, I cannot help but get very choked up with the now familiar deeply painful emotion of that day.

As I reflect on what has taken place since then, it is stunning to me that only seven years after these attacks we elected a man to the highest office in the land whose very name sounds like one of the hijackers.  Not only that, but true to form, he has treasonously behaved in a manner which has directly aided and abetted the sort of people who committed the act since the day he took office.  

Sadly, with only a matter of weeks away from the most important, and depending upon the outcome, quite possibly the final election in our nation’s history; an election that will decide the fate and future of America, we are dangerously close to continuing this legacy of treason in the person of Hillary Clinton.

While no leader can completely protect us from attack, we will collectively rise to a new level of insanity if we choose a woman who has already demonstrated a total lack of respect for our military and police, has treated our classified secrets with gross criminal negligence, turned her back on our people in Benghazi, and with open arms would import hundreds of thousands of the same people who attacked us into our midst. 

We have a clear choice America.  We maybe survive or we completely collapse in November.