Last Friday was the 25th anniversary of 9/11. For those of us that were around, it was an extremely impactful event. I was at a class learning about Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) in Charlotte, NC. We didn’t have a phone or access to constant media and so news mostly came through the grapevine. Somebody called the office and was notified by a coworker. It wasn’t until my drive home after work that I got some talk radio input about what was actually happening.

I spoke to my wife before I left and she had heard in kind of the same fashion that I did. We met at home around typical dinner time and turned on the TV. A fellow co-worker from Oregon was working his notice and moving back home called me. His TV was already packed up and asked if he could come over and watch the news. Of course we said yes, we were a country in shock and looking for answers.

The vision I will never get out of my head was the guy that decided to jump to his death from Tower 2 rather than get burned by fire. It was the front page picture on the Charlotte Observer the next day but of course it we saw the video on the news. For some people, it was so devastating that people like Peter Jennings of ABC news took up smoking again to die from lung cancer four years later.

I will never forget that the world almost stopped. The stock market took a week long hiatus and NFL games were cancelled. Of course all flights were cancelled for three days and even my wife was dismissed from work for the remainder of the week. The roads and skies were quiet, the weather was pleasant and it was just dead still.

I of course continued my class and my business didn’t stop. But, the company owners did something that almost everyone felt. They handed out bumper stickers that said “Proud to be American”. Overnight the American flag was added to every car and displayed home. I kind of felt like if your flag wasn’t visible, you were subject to ‘stink eye’ and your patriotism was in question.

There was a lot of anger. In my circle, blue collar South Carolina, revenge was highly desired. I personally felt like there was nothing to justify killing 2000 innocent civilians but I could certainly understand the anger towards the United States for imperialism, political manipulation and pseudo subjugation. There was also a lot of complicity. People were so shocked and even unified that they were willing to give up first amendment rights in the name of empathy. They accepted creation of Homeland Security and voluntary vehicle searches at the airport.

I don’t like a lot of what happened post 9/11. I don’t like the Patriot Act, the growth of government for false security or an 18 year war of futility. But you cannot beat the feeling that we as a nation had on September 12th. We were truly indivisible as people.

The event of September ended the lives of 2977 people. It effected an unofficial count of 4000-5000 people from secondary illnesses. 7073 soldiers were killed and 50,563 wounded in the middle east conflict as a result of vengnece. 7800 military contractors were killed and 1464 allied troops lost their lives in the conflict. It is estimated that nearly one million civilians died from the warfare. Another estimate of 500,000 cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) were resulting from service. I personally know of one suicide resulting from post war PTSD but I am confident that have been many more.

What I really wanted to talk abut today was the lack of remembrance. I saw a handful of articles on my Windows newsfeed but nothing like I was expecting. I thought it was going to be all day long, but it really wasn’t. I suppose I cannot blame people for not being to relate. It is like my relationship to December 7, 1941. That was something that happened 34 years before I was born. I wasn’t there, I didn’t live through it. How can I possibly relate?

I will live the rest of my life with the image of the office worker jumping out of the window. But, I was 26. My Dad is 80 now, my in-laws both passed on. We are quickly getting to the time that we were too young to be impacted or too old to do anything about it. The deeply personal impact it once had has faded with time.

End Your Programming Routine: Yes, we have a lot of problems and many of the are self-inflicted. New York City elects a self proclaimed Islamic fundamentalist and socialist and then wants to complain that he attends the 9/11 commemoration. We keep thinking that if we vote harder, this problem will get resolved. We forget those days like September 12, 2001 when we were all proud to be American regardless of how we got there. That is the spirit of Do Things that Matter.