9/11--no need to remind me

It's the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. The second attack actually. I was in both of them.

In the first one, 1992 I think, I marched down 67 flights of a dark, smokey stairwell from my office in 2 World Trade. Fortunately I had a little flashlight in my briefcase.

On 9/11, though, I had a different job, and I was working across the street from 7 World Trade. I don't need any memorials, let alone bogus docu-dramas, to remind me of what happened. What I saw was too horrible to forget.

Personally, I fared pretty well, though. We were evacuated between the two towers coming down, and I wasn't caught in either dust cloud. Despite having worked in the Trade Center until 1998, I didn't know anyone who was killed there. My old company got just about everyone out safely, and all the rest of the people I knew who worked in the Trade Center also got out. Afterwards I got to work from home for a few weeks (which I liked), and then in a temporary office in midtown for several months more. Eventually my company returned downtown, to the same building. It was always weird going down there, with the towers gone and so many businesses closed.

A recent poll found that a majority of Americans thought 9/11 was more significant to the country than Pearl Harbor--which means a majority of Americans know little of history. As the article pointed out, there was a generation gap here--voters 18-34 were the most ignorant. But I guess it's understandable--people want to think what they are going through is the most important time in history. But heightened security for air travel, and for getting into buildings, is nothing compared to what happened after Pearl Harbor. The "War on Terror," as the Bushites like to call it, will never have more than a tiny percentage of the casualties of World War II--even if you include Bush's War of the Saddam Obsession. We don't even have a draft now, let alone the rationing of meat, gasoline, and I think sugar, that Americans experienced then.

But getting back to today, I'll be avoiding all the memorial TV shows, movies, newspaper and internet articles. I don't need them to remember--as much as I would like to forget.