It's September 11

It’s September 11^th again, and yet another Remembrance Day of the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. I was getting back from PT when it happened at Fort Hood, 25 years ago. Not knowing what would happen after I got done, but my roommate had the TV on, and we saw the planes burrow into the buildings, and needless to say, my life was changed forever after that, with it finally catching up to me with my Iraq deployment. We left for that country under the false pretenses of finding WMD and so on. In my heart, I didn’t know why we were in Iraq, but Bush wanted to attack Saddam anyway, so it happened. I look at that time as a newly minted Sergeant, and so on, as I finally grasped the reality that I could die there a month later. I don’t think much of the people that died, but it takes time for it to hit anyway, like my previous cat Hank. I finally grieved four years later, at his death, and it was a struggle not to cry.

9/11 is the worst tragedy to happen to us, and it galled me that Trump himself said that he was an active participant in some lie or another about the day. He was known for calling in and saying his building was the tallest in NYC, then not doing what he claimed. I don’t get it; if you called in to say your building was the tallest (it wasn’t anyway), then say so. People are getting tired of the lies, and people are seeing what everybody else has seen for years. But this isn’t about Trump; I just wanted to gripe about it. Anyway, a lot of lives were lost on this day 25 years ago. A lot of people who were just living their lives and so on died because extremists thought it would crush us. I think sometimes this nation now is too divided to accurately come together, and at least Trump is alive. It’s not possible these days, unfortunately, to come together and mourn the loss we suffered as a nation. I have some personal beef with them, as my Mom lived ten minutes away from the Pentagon at the time, and still the anger burns in me. But I can’t blame a 9-year-old Mamdani for existing in a world he probably still didn’t understand.

It’s an admission that if I had known Mamdani back in 2004, I might have looked at him in derision rather than support. It’s not wrong to have a Muslim show up at the 9/11 ceremony. There are bad white people and so on, so it doesn’t matter to me anymore, especially since he’s doing the people of NYC right, not wrong. Sure, he prays to Allah and all that, but it doesn’t mean he's out to enforce Sharia Law, and so the citizens of NYC shouldn't blame him for something he had no control over. And I recently looked at a meme, and it really doesn’t matter what age he was; it’s just the fact that he had no control over those terrorists who rammed the planes into the buildings. It’s not his fault, but again, if it was 2004, I would have disbelieved him; I’m pretty sure of it. I guess now I know that I don’t have a problem with Muslims; I only have problems with Muslims who are trying to kill me.

Honestly, if this blog entry seems disjointed, it’s a collection of thoughts and opinions coming from a mind that never really sat down and thought about it until I decided to post it to the small world I seem to live in. Overall, it’s a travesty that shouldn’t have happened but did. Smearing Mamdani won’t bring them back, but it’s interesting that he released the air-quality files Giuliani withheld, knowing they were suffering from poisoned air. It’s as bad as the finger-pointing that exists now that a Muslim is getting noticed and fighting for a change that this nation has ever needed in its 250 years of existence. Anyway, I hope that if you honor the deaths and so on, you take a minute to realize that, as a nation, we came together and did what was “right,” even though it was also wrong in some ways. Overall, though, hold your head up high, remember the unity we had back then, and use that to fix what Trump has broken.