story20840.xml

story20840.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2006-09-12

I had bought a computer only about a month before, and was in my den going through the day's e-mail when I began to see posts about "this terrible event on TV." So I went into the living room and turned on NBC. Everything had been pre-empted by then for live coverage. Both towers had been hit but were still standing. It took a while for me to get up to speed on what had occurred, but I was watching when the first one fell. My mother and I kept the TV on all that day and all evening, till 11 or 12. We even ate in front of it. We had *never* done that, not even during the four days after JFK's assassination. The next day as soon as we were awake it went on again and stayed on. We must have been glued to that set for at least three days. There wasn't much we could do to help, but we sent a bag of thick clean socks and a couple of cans of beef stew to the rescue workers when a collection truck set up in front of the downtown mall, and I called the ASPCA to ask what was being done for neighborhood animals.

All through the first day I kept alternating between the living room and the den, where I was still online. Several of my groups set up roll calls--"Is everybody OK?"--and I responded to all of them. I didn't know anyone who was in the Towers, but I have a girlfriend who did, and I don't think she has been able to go back to NYC since the last funeral she attended.

I have always been a strong patriot (during the Vietnam War I was a hawk), and I don't think that has changed. I display an American flag in the front window of my apartment (just a little one, but it's a flag), and I intend to keep it there until radical Islamic terrorism is utterly crushed. Yet I don't blame Muslims as a whole for what happened. I know the terrorists are a minority, a "lunatic fringe." I *do* think we might make greater strides against them if their own people would help us more.

Occasionally I'll read about some new wrinkle in Homeland Security and be a bit disturbed, but none of it has really affected me directly, and I doubt it will. I haven't changed my lifestyle because I don't believe that my town is important enough to be targeted, and I don't travel, so the likelihood of my being involved in an attack seems very small. I don't claim to know whether the Bush response was the very best one, but I *do* think that only by bringing prosperity and democracy to the Middle East can we even begin to cut the legs out from under the terrorist movement, and I'm quite sure that the terrorists themselves understand nothing but violence.