9-11

I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia.

History dressed up in the glow of love__ kiss turned grief into beauty.

Listen. Outside this frame I can see light,heavy as pardon, reliable as granite.Help me. Help me drag it into the picture.

True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it.

Me, personally. I do not know a soul who perished that day of 9/11. But it did then, does now, and I imagine it always will bring out the Patriot in me.

For months in the fall of 2001, our highways looked like a county fair on wheels. "Look out, Al-Qaeda---patriot on board!" I once saw a guy with five flags tell a guy with four flags to go back to Afghanistan.

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was.

If I can be perfectly blunt, his humanities teacher was an ass.

All my life my dad felt this need to protect his kids from a war he fought, a war I believed could never reach out and touch us, could never hurt us__nd yet he fed us lies with his answers, shielding us from the truth about what he did there, about what he saw, about who he was before the war, and about what he became because of it. He lied to protect us from his memories, from his nightmares. Standing with my dad at The Wall, I knew the truth__o one could know so many names engraved in granite if he 'never was in danger.

The last two days I__e been on long bus rides, driven through the countryside on the back of a motorbike, and crossed rivers on wooden boats, traversing currents into a different century. It__ late and dark, but I__ so close now. My uncle died five kilometers from here.

I asked my dad once if his high school teachers began treating kids differently during Vietnam, when they knew some of their students would be drafted and sent to war. I was curious because for sure we__ started treating our military kids differently after 9/11. He just shrugged and changed the subject, like he always did. And that was okay with me. He__ go back and change a lot of things if he could; and like everyone else, I__ give anything to go back to the day before 9/11__ut all we can do is move forward.

I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They__l be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I__ taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and help him get current. Maybe he__ invite me back as a guest lecturer. He__ probably expect some strategies along with the situations though, so I guess that wouldn__ work, but whatever.

This is my worst fear. It__ not keeping my students safe from terrorists, it__ knowing what to do when the Chaplain comes to take Johnny out of class because not letting the terrorists win means sometimes the good guys are going to die. And those good guys have kids, and they__e sitting in my classroom.

DPRK translates to Democratic People__ Republic of Korea__nd if the words Democratic and Republic sound like a good thing, well, it__ oxymoronic because the Korea we__e talking about here is the communist one in the North, and when I said the pastor__ father was their guest, what I really meant is he was shot down, captured, tortured, and held prisoner by a depraved enemy in what today can only be described as a failed state.

It__ hard to describe being an expatriate of sorts to people who__e never lived overseas, but when you__e an American living in a geographically separated region within a country like Korea, you form bonds with people who you__ never associate with stateside.