"If we learn nothing else from this tragedy,
we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate." ~ Sandy Dahl, wife of pilot of Flight 93 Jason Dahl
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in my home office awaiting a scheduled telephone conference call for a Board of Directors meeting. I was watching the small television set that I keep on my desk when they broke into regular programming to show that an airplane had apparently flown into one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York. Of course, anyone reading this knows what followed, but at the time no one really knew what was happening. I received the Board Meeting telephone call, but we had a very short meeting, since all the Directors were watching the same thing on television that I was. For the rest of the day, Bonnie and I, and probably the rest of the world, were glued to our television sets watching the story of the terrorist attack unfold. To summarize the events for my own interest, it is known generally now as “nine eleven” and was a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States. The terrorists hijacked four commercial jet airliners, crashing two of them into the two tower buildings at the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth plane, which may have been heading for the Capitol Building or the White House, crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania. Both of the twin towers at the World Trade Center collapsed within a couple of hours of being hit by the planes. As horrified, as I was to see the planes fly into the buildings, I can’t put into words the feeling I had when I saw those buildings collapse. It was just unbelievable. There were so many emotions; we couldn’t understand why these planes had flown into the buildings in the first place, we couldn’t imagine these huge buildings actually collapsing, and then came the thought of all the people in the buildings, and the knowledge that none of them could possibly survive. It was reported that approximately 3,000 people died in these attacks. I spend a few minutes on September 11th remembering this terrible day.
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