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The Day Before

I don’t remember much about September 10th, 2001. I’m sure I had a list of things to do the next day, I’m sure I had an agenda to follow and things to do, but I can’t remember a single one of them.

I went to bed in one world on Monday, and I woke up in another one on Tuesday.

It all seems like another world; the things that we worried about on Monday, September the 10th. They were all torn away like thin tissue paper on the following day. I had a different life when I went to bed on the 10th from the one I woke up with on the 11th and the one I lead today from the one I lead then.

On Monday September 10th, I was working on a new team at work, concerned with converting Solaris to Linux, from Sparc to x86, worried if the next round of layoffs that was going through the entire industry would reach me and my little team of technical staff. Were we about to be “outsourced” like so many others in our business had been, or just “whacked” from the corporate roles altogether?

I could have said that about any day in September 2001, not just the 10th. I have no specific memory of that specific day, and yet it was a day that would mark the end of a way of life, you would think some memory of that day would remain with me. Nothing would be the same the next day, and yet, there was no sign that a major change was coming, no strange light on the horizon marking the coming fire.

I think it’s a sign of just how traumatic the day to come would be. If you get into a serious car accident, the fact that you forgot to mow the lawn the day before, which was right up to the moment of the accident the most important thing on your mind, right up to the moment your car went crunching along into the telephone pole, turns to vapor with only the slightest scent of sigificance left hanging on your mind after the accident.

Lawn? Mow? Laundry? Grocery store? Bagels? Pound patrami? Sauerkraut? What?

Big trauma is the kind of thing that wrecks your soul like a 5 year old wrecks a chessboard when he realizes he’s about to lose. He laughs at you and the flips the board into the air and all the pieces and the board fly about, while you just sit there at the table with a dumb look on your face. As you try to pick things up, you can’t really remember where you were in the game when it ended.

I lived most of my life in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. I didn’t live in Germany, but in Western world, the non-communist world, we knew that as long the wall was standing, there were sure to be men with guns, tanks, aircraft and missiles willing to make sure it stood there doing its evil business. There would be other men on this side, ready to stop them. No matter where we stood in the political spectrum, the shadow of that thing and all it represented, hung over all of our lives.

No matter what people think today, people should know that the Cold War went on for the better part of 40 years and people died fighting it every single day for that entire time. It wasn’t bloodless. It was bloody and right up till the very end, it could have gone either way. Men died and people were killed every day for 40 years. The fact that it didn’t become a nuclear exchange shouldn’t be used as evidence that there was no fighting and that it was peaceful. There was fighting and dying all through the Cold War.

It was not peace; it was living daily with the shadow of big horror that might be, lit up by the occasional flare of the “brush wars”. It was war fought on a more strategic level with more people wary of the consequences, but it was war all the same.

Once the wall came down, it took awhile for me to let go of it and all it represented. The war was over, but it seemed very unreal; it was the most unlikely of results. It was the last thing I expected to happen. I had expected the war to begin right at the very place that had seem people with champagne in one hand, using sledgehammers in the other to knock down the cement creature that had snaked through all of our lives.

The big war I had expected to come for all of my lifetime, never came, and for awhile I was actually certain that it was “just a trick”. It seems so silly now, but for the first couple of years, I kept looking for some sign that it was just fakery by the other side, meant to put us off our guard.

It never came of course, and eventually I had to let it go. I began to enjoy a world I could never image as a child. A world without Strategic Air Command and its unspoken Soviet equivalent making slow ovals in the sky, making their contrails silently with their deadly cargos ready to do the work we sent them to do with just a word. No SAC, no “Alerts”, we turned our missiles off and we all went home.

Frankly, it was a world without Soviets.

I remember the first time my son, born long after the end of the cold war asked me “ Daddy, whats a Communist?”. The question shocked me but half way through my answer, I was crying tears of joy with my explanation. An enemy so gone, they became a trivia question in a board game just five years after their complete collapse. In the end, the “10ft tall” men of the Soviet Union that I had feared in my childhood were no more than the equivalent of hunchbacked, gap toothed “carnys” in a travelling tent revival meeting in his. The Soviet was just an edge of town revival tent held up only by the point of bayonets, full of the sweet smell of good intentions, hot air and the promise of a better world made true by the desire to “stick it to the man”, but completely empty of anything that actually worked.

In 1989, they pulled up stakes, leaving nothing behind but a field full of litter, where the day before the glittery hopes of the little people were on display as evidence of their ascendancy.

If what happened on September 11th 2001 had happened on September 11th 1991, I think I would have been better prepared. I would have been half expecting it.

All through the 1990s, you read books like Fukyamas “ The End of History” that were basically made by people like myself who were lost in a world without any real meaningful challenge to the Western World. China? Yeah, they were Communist, but not really a competitor and after the collapse of the “Communist mother church” in Russia and the signs of the cracking at Tienamien Square, you felt like it was just a matter of time before they went too into the ashcan of history. Islamic terror? it wasn’t even on the radar. It was like fearing some splinter group of the IRA. A car bombing here, a hijacking there, a nuisance, but not really a threat. Iran? Couldn’t even beat Iraq in a 10 year war. In 1992, we beat the Iraqis, all while the usual leftists suspects said that thousands of Americans world die and that the US Military had ordered body bags in the thousands in anticipation, our doom was foretold because we were imperialists and they were strong men of the middle east, used to the ways of the desert, while we were soft and incapable western imperialists who would meet our doom as we had before in Vietnam.

The war, such as it was, was over in 100 hours and we, the soft Americans were victorious. Our losses of men in the war seemed inconsequential. We had faced the Soviet Union by proxy, its client the Iraqi Army and their equipment was as worthless for them as it was in Afghanistan.

Our troops came home to parades and the President said;“ We beat Vietnam Syndrome”. It all melted away in the mouth of history like cotton candy.

We put our trucks and tanks back into storage and we piece by piece dissembled the military. “War is hell” but peace can be utterly brutal to the military and the 1990s were worse than any peace before. There didn’t seem to be any sense to keep it all going, who was it we were we going to fight anyway?

For once, there was no need to worry about the enemy on the other side of the hill. The rules of business were replacing the rules of battle and warfare. “We might just get through this after all”, I thought. It was a warm syrupy opiate of a thought, and like most addicts I took in as much I could get, and overlooked the side effects.

The mind-set of the 1990’s were like cough medicine narcotics; all sweet and addictive and a spoonful at a time. The “world of the internet”, the new world of global commerce and a whole new way of doing business. Profit didn’t matter, “eyeballs” mattered. Business mattered, not military might, that was the old way and those days were gone, just like the wall itself was gone.

It was all so damn dumb. Like an office christmas party that goes on too long and gets too loud, you almost hope no one remembers it, but we do, we all do.

I don’t really remember what I was doing on September 10th. When I awoke the next day, it was as if I awoke in a house in the middle of a forest fire. Whether or not I had done the laundry the day before didn’t seem to matter anymore because by mid afternoon I was wondering if y the end of the day, I would have a house in which to do it.

To this day, I start the day the same way every day. I quickly check the TV, to see if any commercials are playing. If there are, then everything is ok. Because the first thing I remembered on September 11th was something I didn’t think about when I saw it at the time.

There were no commercials on that day.

My head hit the pillow on the night of September 10th in a world of concerns and worry for things that, in the end, didn’t really matter anymore. All sickly sweet and full of nothing but the numbing effects of an addictive, self destructive medicine I should have been smart enough to know better than to take in such quantities. A world of debating tax cuts, petty office politics and a stock market that was on its way down rather than up as it had been all through the 1990’s.

But the world I awoke to on the morning of September 11th, was a world at a war. A war that I thought in the "cherry flavored" 1990's would never come.

Posted @ September 09, 2007 09:51 PM | Current Affairs

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Posted by: GyorgLyquor at September 10, 2007 11:38 AM

Posted by: Vittle at September 10, 2007 11:36 PM