5 years ago today I woke up and went about my morning routine. It was a beautiful sunny fall morning in upstate NY so I took my coffee and egg on toast sandwich along with a book out onto the porch for a relaxing breakfast. One of the neighborhood dogs had escaped the solitary confinement of his yard prison and wandered over sniveling and whining and nuzzling me with his cold nose until I agreed to share my breakfast with him. Satisfied he consented to being petted for a couple minutes before running off to see what trouble he could get into before his long-suffering owner could bring him back into custody and I set off to start my day.

Before I could fire up the computer though the phone rang. Now I have a friend who has a habit of calling way too early in the morning so this was not unexpected, but that day all my friend could say was to blurt out, "We're being attacked!"

Huh?

"We're being attacked. They got the World Trade Center. They're using the airplanes as missles! Turn on the television."

Well, at that time I had already given up television so that meant logging on to the internet and pulling up a tiny, pixelated video feed from one of the online news sites. And there was one of the World Trade Center towers belching smoke from a gaping maw in its' side. And then a tiny silver sliver dashed across the postage-stamp sized image and in a flash the other tower was just the same.

And there I sat. Listening to the confused news reports, both on my video feed that kept cutting out and needing restarting and on the radio. No one knew what was going on. Just as I thought it couldn't get any worse one of the towers fell. And then the other. And just like that, in less than an hour and a half, we were told that possibly 100,000 people had lost their lives. Later that number had dropped to 10,000. The final number was only (only!) 2,749 lives. Can you believe I felt relief?

And that was how I spent the morning of September 11, 2001. I suspect it's not very much different from the way the majority of Americans, at least the ones who weren't dying, spent that morning. Actually, I can't say the above is very accurate. The truth is I don't remember very much from that morning. It was all a blur. Just two days before, on September 9, I had been in lower Manhattan less than a block from the World Trade Center. I remember thinking at the time that it was a shame that it was so late in the day and the group I was with had to drive back upstate because, despite living in New York State my whole life, I had never been in the World Trade Center towers. And now, not even 48 hours later, they were gone along with so many of the people who worked there.

I'm afraid if you're expecting any great words of comfort or for me to somehow put it all into perspective then you're going to be disappointed. I can't do that. 5 years later and I still avert my eyes when videos of the attacks on that day come on screen. And I still cringe at the sound of the impacts of those two jets on the towers. What can I say? The events of that beautiful fall day were senseless acts of violence and should never have happened. There is no comfort, there is no perspective to be had. The nation was violently attacked on that day and still the wounds have not healed.

Neither am I going to get political on this day. It's bad enough that we've had five years of an administration that has exploited the memories of those unthinkable atrocities for political gain, or that a major television network should distort and mangle those memories via a vile propaganda piece and tell us they do it to honor the dead. I will not lower myself to their level.

What I will say though, and I know many of you will violently disagree (36% give or take to put a number to it), that of all the ghouls picking and gnawing at our still open wounds, some are worse than others. 

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