I missed out on experiencing the shock the people around me did during 9/11. There was a good reason. I didn't have a television set at the time. I didn't see any of the pictures of the planes crashing into the twin towers until two or three days later. Today, I heard a comment that I realized wasn't true for me. A news commentator made the statement that "Everybody in America remembers where they were and what they were doing when they found out about what happened that day." I don't. I just wasn't paying attention. I didn't know it was going on. I didn't see the pictures. I wasn't shocked about the brutality of it all for days afterward. By then, it was too late for me to share in the national outrage. I did share the emotion, but it was other people's emotion about something i didn't participate in. Simply because I didn't have a working TV set.
I do know where I was and what I was doing when John Kennedy was assassinated, so I do know what the journalist was talking about. I felt the emotion other people felt at the same time they did. Both the Kennedys' and Martin Luther King assassinations were sad and shocking events for me. As soon as I heard about what happened I went and turned on the TV and participated in what followed via the focus of the media. Especially the assassination of the President of the United States. That seemed counter-intuitive. I knew it was possible, but I never thought it would happen.
Oddly enow, what happened on 9/11 did seem possible. My first thought was that Bush and Cheney facilitated it. They wanted it to happen so they could win the next election as a war time President. It's not unusual for me to make rash speculations. I constantly provide a disclaimer about not knowing the truth. I capture drifting thoughts with words. I can't do that and be sure of those thought's veracity. I'm just saying those were the first drifting thoughts I captured with words after what happened.
I wonder how I would have responded if I had been able to watch TV and experience with the nation what happened on 9/11. If I had been caught up in the emotion of the moment. Would I have been objective enough to make such a daring speculation. Probably not. I'm a sucker for a good line.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
