Above, a screen-shot of mine from August 17th of Washington Post columnist and ABC-TV News commentator George F. Will -on left- at a Florida Marlins at Colorado Rockies ballgame at Coors Field, Denver.
George F. Will on the American landscape ten years after 9/11: Commemoration can’t heal what is self-inflicted
The Washington Post
Sept. 11’s self-inflicted wounds
By George F. Will, Opinion Writer
Published: September 9, 2011
On Dec. 8, 1951, the day after the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the New York Times’ front page made a one-paragraph mention of commemorations the day before, when the paper’s page had not mentioned the anniversary. The Dec. 8 Washington Post’s front page noted no commemorations the previous day. On Dec. 7, the page had featured a familiar 10-year-old photograph of the burning battleships. It seems to have been published because a new process made possible printing it for the first time in color. At the bottom of the page, a six-paragraph story began: “Greater Washington today will mark the tenth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack by testing its air raid defenses.” The story explained that “the sirens are part of a ‘paper bombing’ of Washington” that would include “mock attacks by atom bombs and high explosives.”
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George Will's time in Colorado later proved grist for an August 31 column of his titled Colorado's fresh brew, which largely dealt with the relative popularity of Colorado governor John Hickenlooper -A Democratic governor who favors less government- and TABOR, the Taxpayers Bill of Rights legislation approved by Colorado voters to limit the Colorado legislature’s ability to raise taxes, which many of the Usual Suspects want to litigate in court to over-turn the decision they couldn't win at the ballot box.
Above, one of the Community Resilience project counseling fliers I've kept which were posted in stores and govt. buildings all throughout Arlington County in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks.
Because of where I lived in residential north Arlington, relatively quiet compared to near Reagan National Airport, and because I had an upper-floor bedroom with very large windows, at night, when they were open, I could hear the fighter jets which patrolled the area for months afterwards.
In those very first weeks of the overflights, sometimes, more often than I'd admit then, I couldn't fall sleep until I heard the 3 a.m. overflights soaring directly above.
They were very precise and almost always on time, even when the NATO forces took over after so many of the American fighter pilots were in Afghanistan.
That sound gave me some sense of peace and I could finally relax a bit.
But when they were late, I can recall staring up at the ceiling in the dark, or walking over to the window and looking south towards the Pentagon a few miles away, wondering when it would ever come. At those moments, I felt not a sense of dread, just one of complete exhaustion and a sense that my security blanket was missing.
U.S. FLAG OVER THE PENTAGON
I'm re-posting here an excerpt I originally ran four years ago, 9-9-07, on my other blog, South Beach Hoosier, since some of you newer readers may never have seen it before. It's my personal experiences in Washingon, D.C. on 9/11, working on Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the FBI and DOJ, five blocks from The White House and with a clear view on that sunny day of the U.S. Capitol, twelve blocks southeast.
Let me relate a 9/11 anecdote that gives you some sort of insight into me, and informs my posts here. I lived for about 15 years in Washington, D.C., and while there, worked on behalf of some of the top law firms and business groups in town, doing all sorts of things on both Capitol Hill and along the K Street corridor.
While doing so, I was fortunate to meet and befriend lots of very talented, committed and impressive people, including many from the media, think tank and public policy sectors, as well as the diplomatic community.
On 9/11, I was working on a project for Crowell & Moring, in an office in their DC office right across the street from the FBI & DOJ, and next to the Naval Memorial. After the initial reports of the attack in New York City and on The Pentagon, from our vantage point on the large patio overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, we could see past the Old Post Office across the street, and could clearly see the smoke rising up from The Pentagon to our southwest.
Being equidistant to both The White House and the U.S. Capitol -and thus, in a direct position to have seen any attack on either- once we received word to evacuate the building because a plane within range of DC still hadn't been accounted for -what we would all later all know asUnited 93-I decided to forego playing the role of a sardine in a can on the Metro, and decided instead to walk the 7-plus miles to my home in north Arlington: via K Street, M Street in Georgetown, and finally Lee Highway in Arlington.
When I got a few blocks away from the office and was near Metro Center, whom do you suppose I walked right into, but the one man, whom, IF things had fallen differently, might've played a much larger role that tragic day?
(As I walked and walked, it was while listening on my Sony AM/FM/TV portable radio, via ABC News' Good Morning America -the same program that had informed my entire floor for 90 minutes before when we gathered en masse around my radio in our floor lobby area- that I first learned that some of the planes involved in the attacks had departed out of Boston's Logan Airport.
That news made my heart sink, and made the walk home seem far longer than it normally would, since one of my former housemates in Arlington, Jennifer Dugan, a wonderfully sweet, thoughtful and immensely adorable University of Rhode Island grad, was, in fact, a flight attendant for US Airways, working out of Logan.)
That man I'm referring to was George Terwilliger, then of the DC office of McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe LLP, whom I knew from 1627 Eye Street, the location of the New York Times' DC bureau, who's now at WhiteCase, http://www.whitecase.com/gterwilliger/
Mr. Terwilliger was the man that much of the Washington press corps and Beltway Crowd thought was the likely first choice for President George W. Bush to be FBI Director, and a person that many of my friends at 1627 had an enormous amount of respect and admiration for, even if they disagreed with him politically.
When I saw him in passing on the sidewalk, with a pensive look on his face, like everyone passing us on both sides and spilling out onto the roads, all I could think to myself was, "Be careful what you wish for."
George F. Will column archives:
9/11 PILOT MOHAMMED ATTA'S FLORIDA DRIVER'S LICENSE
United we stand...
World Trade Center, Manhattan
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