Twenty Years Later

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was a naïve 25 year old almost turning 26. As an Information Technology consultant, I had just arrived on-site for the first day of a project for a new customer in Washington, D.C. The customer was in the financial sector. I arrived and walked up to the door about ten minutes before 9:00am. An employee greeted me with “Did you hear? A plane has struck one of the World Trade Center towers in New York.”

When I questioned him for details, he couldn’t give me any at all, so I didn’t think much of it. I had also been listening to the news on the radio in my car not 10 minutes before and it wasn’t mentioned. Once I got inside, I discussed the project with the owner of the company. The original employee that greeted me was in another room nearby. He was saying loudly to everyone that the news was reporting it was “really bad” at the WTC. Then he shouted that the second tower had been struck by another plane.

That’s when everyone in the entire office knew America was under attack. A television was rolled out for everyone, and we all watched in horror as the rest of the events of that day unfolded. At one point in all the chaos, my Nextel phone on my hip gave me a single buzz. I looked at it and saw that a voice mail had come in. I thought of that as strange because I hadn’t received a call – I would have known it if I had as the Nextel phone’s vibration was strong enough to be able to wake someone up from sound sleep.

When I tried to connect to voice mail, I discovered the reason why. All circuits were busy from everyone calling their loved ones in a panic. A few minutes later, though, I was able to make a connection, listened to the voice mail, and it was my mom ensuring I was OK. I took another ten minutes of attempting to call my mom before I could get another circuit. When I talked to her, I assured her I was OK and wasn’t in a part of D.C. that would be considered exceptionally dangerous. I was in northwest D.C. about a mile inside the line on Connecticut Ave, somewhat distant from any likely targets.

I chose to wait it out at the customer site even though the rest of D.C. was in the middle of an impromptu evacuation. I left a little after 2:00 pm and remained glued to the television with rabbit ears in my small studio apartment well into that evening. I lived within my means and didn’t subscribe to cable television. I only had a bed, a computer on a desk, and a dresser with my television sitting on top of it.

A lot has happened with me in those twenty years since. I got married, had two kids, and have a decent savings account now along with the house we live in. I also discovered I have an inoperable slow-growing brain tumor in the center of my brain that has likely been there since early childhood. It nearly killed me in 2016 when it caused obstructive hydrocephalus and a shunt had to be placed in my head and a tube in my body to divert fluid in my brain to my abdomen.

A lot has also happened with America in those twenty years since. In the months that followed 9/11 there were some people screaming that this new so-called Patriot Act was passed to broaden domestic surveillance activities and create a police state out of America, not to fight terrorists. I generally ignored those people.

Sometime in early 2002, I went to another customer site to install Windows 2000 Small Business Server. One of the components of that product was Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server, or ISA Server for short. When I talked to the owner of that business, he didn’t want ISA installed because he “didn’t want Bill Gates to be able to see what we’re doing.” I laughed out loud. He looked at me like I was an asshole. If I could, I would go back to that person and personally apologize to him because he was right and I was an idiot. And an asshole. (I still am, but I was one too.)

I fully realized he was right in 2013 while working another position in Information Technology at that time. I also came to fully understand just how bad it was going to get for America moving forward. What I failed to realize was the speed at which things would start being implemented, which accelerated in 2020. I also failed to realize that large parts of the American population would be either completely oblivious to it all at best or cheering it on at worst. It really speaks to how well the psy op has been orchestrated.

Now on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, we have a puppet cadaver-in-chief who was instructed to pull out of Afghanistan in the most absurd and ghastly way possible while handing it back over to the Taliban and wrapping things up with the exclamation point of drone striking a large innocent family with children. He’s also signing executive action after executive action handed to him, some of them blatantly unconstitutional. One of those dictates that Americans must get injected with poison or lose their job. And we’re under constant surveillance while those same devices surveilling us feed us endless propaganda.