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I’m older than the other folks here at Canadian Atheist, so my perspective can be a bit different. I remember a Y2K job I had once. I was subcontracted to a government ministry. There was lots to do, since at the time no one knew what would happen when the clock ticked over. Maybe it was hype, but people were worried.

Then it came and went, and people thought how silly they had been. I got a better job, and moved on. But then the Dotcom bubble burst, contracts dried up, and those into tech stocks lost everything.

I ended up relegated to temp work, but you fall down, you get back up, dust yourself off, and keep going.

One of the jobs I had was working in an office building downtown. The work was dull, but the people were nice. We had a West Indian lady manager, another woman with a thick Eastern European accent, a cute girl from Dubai, a no nonsense Caribbean girl, and the baldest, gayest, Jewish guy, I ever met.

This particular morning was like any other, coffee, small talk, gossip, gay guy on the phone with his partner…

Someone mentioned a plane hitting a building somewhere. We were on the 22nd floor, hahah. No, really. Dumb pilot.

Mental image: plane with propeller bouncing, all cartoony, off a building.

Gay guy gets off the phone, babbling about a plane. Yeah, yeah, we heard about that, already.

“No, there were two planes.”

I’m not sure I can accurately describe the look in his eyes, but it was a mirror of what I felt, numb fear. I was a child near the end of the cold war, and he was older than me. The childhood fear of how everything can change radically, and horribly, was what I felt.

Caribbean girl, getting off her phone, mentions a TV set located on a lower floor, people are down there already. We had a service desk, so I volunteer to hold down the fort, while the others check it out.

Now, I’m a bit of a news junkie, I know how CNN works, big story, few details, lots of talking heads, same details over and over. No twitter or youtube yet. And two planes.

So, I’m in the office alone, and I figure I’ll check the news sites. CNN, timed out, Toronto Star, timed out, over and over, all the news sites I can think of, timed out.

The internet is down.

I eventually got the details second hand when they came back, about 20 minutes later. Not a lot of talking after that, and we got sent home before noon with the rest of the downtown workers in the city. Sent home, like when a really bad snow storm hits.

I didn’t watch the news for the next couple of days, live news is always frustratingly incomplete. But more details filtered through at work… planes diverted to Canadian airports, the entire USA becoming a no fly zone…indefinitely, friends of mine driving rental cars home from business trips, all the hijackers were Muslims, more hijacked planes, the pentagon, Iran and Syria acknowledge the American right to vengeance, British commandos dropped into Afghanistan, and the Taliban government refuses to turn over any terror suspects, or even ask them to leave their country. Not giving an inch.

Nothing much was happening a month later. Even neocon Dubya seemed at a loss for anything but rhetoric. Was this going to be another Bush desert war, or the beginning of something bigger?

Very soon though, NATO was at war, nothing cold about it.

Six months later I was in a bar after work, with a Filipino friend. The tables were small and it was a bit cramped. We started talking with this couple who were next to us; a young English guy, and his lady-friend, a girl from Wisconsin.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation turned to world politics, I think we were all curious about the variety of points of view that might be present.

It was a good mix, but as the conversation shifted to 9/11, our female companion began using a napkin to wipe tears from her eyes. She continued to talk though, and no one mentioned the tears. The four of us stayed talking until the bar closed.

That is almost nine years ago, and I’m getting old. I remember Challenger and Columbia, and where I was when Diana died. And I remember the gallows humor that followed all of these. 9/11 took longer to get to the jokes, and in some ways I still don’t think we are there yet, but the wars continue, pullout or not. Maybe after that is all over.

More recently I attended an SSA conference. Young people are so earnest, and free of baggage. I even made some ‘facebook friends’, and one of them had this to say about the “Terror Mosque” issue:

If it would have been allowed in NY before 9/11, it should be allowed now.

And I agree.
Our standards for property rights and religious freedom shouldn’t change because of 9/11. But I also know that for many Americans, many people, 9/11 changed everything. And I know how they feel.

“No, there were two planes.”
Still as clear as yesterday.