MEMORIES

The Seventh Anniversary is tomorrow. In my naivete, or maybe just unbeatable hope, I assumed that time had worked its healing magic, and I am at least free of tears and depressing thoughts. Last night I found out that I am wrong.

Unfortunately, time had worked its magic on the media and all the loudmouths in the country. The story just became an extra weapon in the attack on the people not responsible for it; just another murky political issue; just more fodder for the conspiracy theories. Tomorrow, there will be a whole bunch of speeches, which I have no desire to listen to, because most of them will just going to be a bunch of hot air; literally. Meanwhile, the people truly responsible and their followers just live amongst us, multiply with astonishing rates (mostly on our tax dollars), pretend to be abused, marginalized and persecuted, while funneling the money to their fighting brothers and sisters under the guise of charitable work. Their "peaceful" religion is shoved down our throats by the brotherhood of multiculturalism as something that we are supposed to not only accept, but respect and revere.

And the majority just prefers their favorite game: impersonating ostriches. After all, it's just easier on the psyche not to think about it, subconsciously hoping that nothing even remotely resembling this tragedy will ever happen any time soon. Few months ago I signed an on-line petition protesting the current design of the Shanksville Memorial, which is planned to be a crescent - Muslim symbol of faith! I forwarded that petition to all my friends, with the request to sign and pass it on to as many as they could. I can only hope that they actually did it, because I only got two responses: one, full of indignation about this disgusting matter, and another one sheepishly informing me that there were reasons not to sign. Great! Just great!

A couple of years ago I started to write sort of an article, trying to put all my memories and jumbled emotions on paper. I am yet to finish it, mostly because I do not want to feel the way I did that night when I started; but one day, with G-d's help, I will finish it. I also did not climb on the top of the Empire State Building in all these years; I can not look south. Maybe I will tomorrow.

Otherwise, tomorrow will be business as usual. People will rise, some of them will even shine, and all of them will start preparing for a normal work day. Some will even tune in to watch and listen to all the planned ceremonies; most will just go on with their usual Thursday activities. For us, it will be a 401-K meeting, with people from our main office flying in, and me ordering lunch. All of our office will assemble to listen to their proposed retirement, munching on that free lunch and asking dumb questions.

And for Michael Sweeney, a modest police officer from Massachusetts, it will be exactly seven years since he lost his wife Amy (according to the last information I have, he still requires therapy). At the time of her murder she was younger than I am now; she left behind two kids, who were at that time six and four. Amy helped to jump start the investigation by calling the flight operations center and relaying the information about the hijackers. And then she told about the plain's rapid descent, and her seeing water and buildings. Few seconds later that plain rammed into the North Tower of the WTC, killing, amongst many others, a young woman from Queens who just found out that morning that she was pregnant with her first child. For her husband, just as for Amy's, tomorrow will not be just another Thursday; just as it won't be for Todd Beamer's widow (even if she has re-married), nor for his children, the third of which was born few months after those brutal murders.

The following article was posted on September 13, 2001. Ann was attacked for the sentiments expressed there; somebody tried to clumsily defend her by saying that she was just reacting to the death of a friend and a former colleague. However, she stood by those sentiments all these years; and now, seven years after, her proposed basic plan of action is more important than ever.


"This Is WarWe should invade their countries.
Ms. Coulter is also a syndicated columnistSeptember 13, 2001 9:05 a.m.

Barbara Olson kept her cool. In the hysteria and terror of hijackers herding passengers to the rear of the plane, she retrieved her cell phone and called her husband, Ted, the solicitor general of the United States. She informed him that he had better call the FBI — the plane had been hijacked. According to reports, Barbara was still on the phone with Ted when her plane plunged in a fiery explosion directly into the Pentagon.
Barbara risked having her neck slit to warn the country of a terrorist attack. She was a patriot to the very end.
This is not to engage in the media's typical hallucinatory overstatement about anyone who is the victim of a horrible tragedy. The furtive cell phone call was an act of incredible daring and panache. If it were not, we'd be hearing reports of a hundred more cell phone calls. (Even people who swear to hate cell phones carry them for commercial air travel.)
The last time I saw Barbara in person was about three weeks ago. She generously praised one of my recent columns and told me I had really found my niche. Ted, she said, had taken to reading my columns aloud to her over breakfast.
I mention that to say three things about Barbara. First, she was really nice. A lot of people on TV seem nice, but aren't. (And some who don't seem nice, are.) But Barbara was always her charming, graceful, vebullient self. "Nice" is an amazingly rare quality among writers. In the opinion business, bitter, jealous hatred is the norm. Barbara had reason to be secure.
Second, it was actually easy to imagine Ted reading political columns aloud to Barbara at the breakfast table. Theirs was a relationship that could only be cheaply imitated by Bill and Hillary — the latter being a subject of Barbara's appropriately biting bestseller, Hell to Pay. Hillary claimed preposterously in the Talk magazine interview that she discussed policy with Bill while cutting his grapefruit in the morning. Ted and Barbara really did talk politics — and really did have breakfast together.
It's "Ted and Barbara" just like it's Fred and Ginger, and George and Gracie. They were so perfect together, so obvious, that their friends were as happy they were on their wedding day. This is more than the death of a great person and patriotic American. It's a human amputation.
Third, since Barbara's compliment, I've been writing my columns for Ted and Barbara. I'm always writing to someone in my head. Now I don't know who to write to. Ted-and-Barbara were a good muse.
Apart from hearing that this beautiful light has been extinguished from the world, only one other news flash broke beyond the numbingly omnipresent horror of the entire day. That evening, CNN reported that bombs were dropping in Afghanistan — and then updated the report to say they weren't our bombs.
They should have been ours. I want them to be ours.
This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson.
We don't need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. We don't need an "international coalition." We don't need a study on "terrorism." We certainly didn't need a congressional resolution condemning the attack this week.
The nation has been invaded by a fanatical, murderous cult. And we welcome them. We are so good and so pure we would never engage in discriminatory racial or "religious" profiling.
People who want our country destroyed live here, work for our airlines, and are submitted to the exact same airport shakedown as a lumberman from Idaho. This would be like having the Wehrmacht immigrate to America and work for our airlines during World War II. Except the Wehrmacht was not so bloodthirsty.
"All of our lives" don't need to change, as they keep prattling on TV. Every single time there is a terrorist attack — or a plane crashes because of pilot error — Americans allow their rights to be contracted for no purpose whatsoever.
The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about whether passengers "packed their own bags," and the hostile, lumpen mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)
Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.
© 2001 Universal Press Syndicate"