Late the night before, my wife Chris came home from working the late shift to tell me that her dashboard had begun to light up like a Christmas tree with anomalous warnings, including one about her transmission. I was scheduled to be in Columbus, Ga., before 6:00 a.m. the next morning for work but without checking on what was going on with her truck I couldn’t tell whether the problem would require major service or a quick fix, nor whether it would be safe for her to drive to work the next afternoon — and frankly, she makes better money than I do. So I got out of bed there and then and called the office to tell them I needed to stay home the next day to investigate the trouble. I’ll admit I didn’t mind getting some more sleep than I would have gotten.
The next morning we got up and while I was eating a light breakfast and we were discussing what needed to do about her truck, Chris — as she often does — turned on the TV to The Weather Channel. After a while I decided I would start simply by taking her truck for a test drive, so I went in to take my shower, and turned on the radio in the bathroom to Eagle 106.7, a country station headquartered on the opposite side of metro Atlanta that I like because it plays more than just the country Top 40 of the moment.
As I was getting ready to get in the shower I listened with half an ear while morning DJ Rhubarb Jones spoke of what happens when someone flies a plane into a building. After some more comments sunk in, I came out of the bathroom and asked Chris to change the channel to Fox News so we could find out just what was going on in New York City.
By this time both towers had been hit, and the Pentagon too.
It wasn’t until long after both towers collapsed that I could tear myself away and see about Chris’ truck. I finally took it to a local oil change place that offers transmission service, and the men there were huddled around a radio listening to the coverage. There was speculation that we would be at war before the whole thing was over, and that the draft might even be reactivated, but I was thinking it was like a Tom Clancy novel come to life — and I rather hoped that the kinds of “black” operations he writes about might prove to be feasible in real life.
The transmission light — along with brake warnings that Chris had also reported — proved to be false alarms. An irrational voice in the back of my head whispered that maybe the plane crashes weren’t really happening, that it was all some kind of sick hoax with special effects and the collusion of everyone in the news media as well as the government and the entire populations of New York City and nearby portions of New Jersey who would be able to see the towers still standing despite what was on TV. Ridiculous, of course.
I wondered about the people on those jets, and Chris and I later talked about our planned trip by air to California in late October. We decided to wait and see, since we still had several days to decide whether to complete our reservations. My mother is 75 and my dad will be 77, and both have had cardiac episodes in the last few weeks. If we don’t go, will I ever get another chance to visit them? We can’t afford to take the time to drive.
Has there ever before been an attack on a civilian population — with which the attackers were not already in a formal state of war — that took so many lives? Surely not. People have been comparing this to Pearl Harbor, but the target in 1941 was military, and the Japanese made no attempt to conceal who they were. Some might try to compare it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and perhaps if we had not already been formally at war with Japan for four years when that happened, they might have a point.
What motivates someone to mastermind something like this? It may bear the label of religious fervor, but it can only be pure, evil hate. What God would reward men for doing such things?
We often say, of individual acts of violence, that the guilty “have blood on their hands.“ The mind behind what happened in our country on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, must be drowning in a sea of blood. And maybe if he is captured, that is how he should die: drowned in swines’ blood.
Today there is no black or white, there is no North or South.
There are no liberals, conservatives, Democrats or Republicans. There are only Americans.
Somebody has made a mistake bigger than anyone has ever contemplated making. Somebody is celebrating when they should be getting their affairs in order. Having used hundreds of innocent civilians to kill thousands more, they have committed an act even more monstrous than the Sunday morning sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 — and our people will respond as they did back then, with grim determination to bring justice raining down on the guilty.
To those who did this, and those who shelter them: You may be able to topple our buildings, but you cannot topple us. You have unleashed forces beyond your ken. You have engaged us in a war where our only defense is your annihilation. Having sown the wind, now reap the whirlwind.
Let everyone else take caution, and stay out of the way.
Kevin M. McGehee
September 11, 2001
