Sept 11 in middle America - 2011

Watching the videos of the planes crashing into the world trade center and the buildings collapsing was pretty surreal out here in the Midwest where if you had left the TV off you would not have noticed a single damn thing that was any way different. The most interesting part of the whole 9/11 thing was having a German student living with us at the time because viewing the events through their young eyes was most interesting. Her parents were quite concerned, and it took a couple of telephone calls to convince them that things out here were quite normal, and the worst thing that could happen was that their daughter might have to spend a bit longer in the USA than originally planned, but that was it. Another German girl is here today; she would have been 14 10 years ago, so she remembers the news of that day, but she too fails to grasp that you might not have noticed out here. Today was one of those wonderful September days, the month of my birth, warm, but not too warm, and simply gorgeous. Although not at all planned the Phactor spent the day moving thick slabs of old concrete to the street-side for pickup and recycling, and it did not occur to me until after having settled his tired body on a bench to enjoy both a margarita and the new pond/waterfall, that moving slabs of concrete was a fitting memorial for my remembrance of events 10 years ago. And like the WTC site, out of the destruction of something old, something new arose. However, it is unlikely the new pond and the 9/11 events will remain tied together in my mind because it was more of a coincidence than anything else. And on days like this, when a golden sunset filters through your garden, it is hard to understand how anyone could so hate the idea of people who are just different from you. It does not make me all that happy to remember how much time has passed with little to show for this terrorism than the quagmire of foreign conflicts which only seems to fan the fires of hatred that gave rise to the initial event. Only wish our leaders could understand that tit for tat is a game you cannot win.