Disaster at a Distance: Remembering September 11, 2001

I'm in an early business meeting in Phoenix when the boss abruptly walks in and turns on the television. Smoke is billowing from skyscrapers and someone says, "Oh shit, it's the trade center!" There's nothing we can do, so we numbly alternate between TV and internet news. I know my cousin - a Navy lifer - works in the Pentagon, so I call his wife but she hasn't heard from him. When the information that the planes were probably hijacked by Saudi militants is broadcast, one of my co-workers, a Saudi citizen, asks me if he will be jailed "like the Japanese in WWII". I tell him we don't do that any more.

News drifts into my email days later, some good, most not. My cousin was only scorched around the edges when a fireball of jet fuel blasted through his area. Todd Beamer, the Oracle guy whose sense of humor kept me sane during a big database project, apparently said "Let's roll"and helped force the hijackers to crash into a field instead of another building. A distant cousin I last saw as a rambunctious boy at a church supper died with the rest of Cantor Fitzgerald's employees when the first plane hit their offices.

Now, seven years later, do I feel any safer because of changes to my community and nation? Not only no, but hell no! The specter of "terrorism" has been the excuse for self-serving power grabs by law enforcement officials and politicians. Under the guise of protecting us from evil terrorists, various groups shoved the badly-named "Patriot Act" through the hopper and are violating the Constitution that they are sworn to protect. Warrantless searches and seizures, investigations so secret that you can't even tell your lawyer about them, wire taps that include every wire everywhere are not making me feel safer. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, in a harshly worded decision voiding some but not all of the act, called it "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values."

Locally, under the guise of "combating terrorism", our county sheriff has gone on a rampage against illegal immigrants ... even though none of the plane hijackers were Hispanic. His single-minded, half-witted crusade has increased the emergency response time for the county's rural communities, decreased the arrest rate, decreased the crime investigation rate, and moved deputies off of their regular patrols to his pet project of harassing Hispanics. It's not making me feel safer.

And if I had to answer the Saudi programmer today about the possibility of his being jailed for being a Saudi, a Muslim, or just swarthy and bearded with an accent ... I would have to say "I'm afraid you might be."