Eleven September
Another Eleven September has come around. The second now since the one that they say changed the world. It is unlikey that any one thing can truly change the world these days. The world is as large as it has always been; though, one could probably find a way to go around it by taxi cab and in under 180 days. Mainly there are just so many people in the world, and on the earth, and their interests are all so irr-divertably parochial that it is unlikely that any one set of events could change it. Unless they were to crack it whole like an egg shell.
All the same, the events of two years ago are as close as I would like to have things come to transforming cataclysm.
It is true that I question some aspects of the universal war being waged on behalf of the fight against terror. Less the campaign in Afghanistan, which has more of a directed and focused practical sense to it. More the investigation into the sins of Iraq. Which signifies only the determination of some men to conduct a fishing expedition in a dessert. Terror is too open ended a word, available to too many fights and points of view. It is not a singular thing to conduct a war on in any sense that gives due respect to the meaning of war. It is all purpose all around, and where one sees it. It is, just for that reason, a dangerous thing to fight against.
I remember dimly from the long cold war recently fought, the opinion of some that an enemy was necessary for a people - to keep them focused and contingent, lest contagioned. When that war was over, won one might say, some missed it. For those this one comes on the wings of the mourning dove.
I would not want anyone to think I take the events of two years ago lightly or believe that I do not care. At 0938 this morning when I will be arriving at work (flex time) as I was two years ago. I will stop and think about those people that day. I will think especially about those in the Pentagon. More about them perhaps because I worked in the Pentagon for two years. I was there for the second half of my early career as a sailor. Petty Officer Bushmiller in the language of the people, or more specifically, IS2 Bushmiller. I worked in a unit known as the Chief of Naval Operations Situation Room for Current Intelligence in the Office of the Director of Naval Intelligence. (then Rear Admiral Sumner J. Shapiro). We were mostly all IS's and 1630's there. Navy tours of duty generally last about two years and never more than an enlistment - four years. I was there (deep breath) in 1981, so by 11 Sept. 2001 twenty years or five billet generations separated me from my old unit. Still from what I read in the papers in the days after that attack it seemed to me that except for two people, every one on duty in that office that day - approximately twenty people - were killed. You should believe that I take it all quite seriously and in a measure quite personally.
8:37:55 AM  ;;
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