The Manhattan Skyline Before the September 11th Terrorist Attacks

The first thing I remember is my Mom waking me up by calling me on the phone. I was only living in the fraternity house for a few weeks and school only just started the week prior. I didn’t have class until a little bit later that day so I was sleeping in. Anyway, I didn’t have a cell phone yet so my Mom called me on my house line (I was the only one in the fraternity house with a house line – more on that later) and wanted to know if I was watching the news. I said no, but flipped on the television to see what she was talking about. I hopped from MSNBC (my channel of choice back then) to CNN and finally to FOX News to see what was going on. And what I saw was pretty amazing – one of the buildings that comprised the Twin Towers was burning… and pretty high up, too!

I asked my Mom what was going on and she said a plane flew into one of the towers. We talked for a few minutes and then hung up. I kept laying in bed watching the television wondering if they were going to show a replay of the plane going into the building. And as I laid there watching the television screen, it looked like I got what I was looking for because I saw a plane fly directly into one of the buildings. Except, as I was watching the television I focused in a little bit more and noticed that there was already a building burning – this must have been a second plane! It was shocking to see that happen on live television. Absolutely, utterly shocking to witness.

Now, I don’t want to go through a minute-by-minute recap of that day, but needless to say that within an hour or so the entire fraternity house was awake and all classes had been canceled on campus. But unlike other days off from school, the guys didn’t rush out to get some food and drink to enjoy the day – we were all glued to the large screen television in the living room waiting to see what would happen next. Right after the plane flew into the Pentagon, I remember thinking and saying out loud that the airspace over the Pentagon was restricted and no one could get over it in the first place (I was wrong). I remember flipping through all of the channels on the dial and, remarkably, every single channel on the dial was either broadcasting news coverage of the terrorist attacks or on standby with a message of condolence related to the attacks. And folks, when I say that every channel was covering the attacks or on standby – I mean every channel on the dial. Every single one. It was truly a moment in television history, for sure.

One of the guys who lived in our house was a volunteer fireman. Somewhere around midday – after both towers had fallen – he jumped in his car and went to New York City to help with recovery efforts. When he came back later that night not only were we all still glued to the television, but he had the World Trade Center dust on his fireman boots and gear. It was unbelievable.

Another one of my vibrant memories of that entire situation was how poorly one of my professors handled the situation. I don’t know if I’ve ever written about this particular professor, but he was straight out of the 1940’s university setting – down the ultra elitist attitude and tweed elbow patches on his jacket. Anyway, what I remembered about this first class back on campus (the day following the attacks) was that this professor opened the class by saying, “Notwithstanding the events of yesterday morning, we are here for a different reason. So, let’s open our books to chapter one and begin reading about Cain and Abel.”

I was amazed at how cold and callous that professor was that night – especially considering that he was talking to a room filled with scared, horrified college students. This was a British Literature class where, over the course of the ensuing semester, we talked about traditional literary themes like good versus evil and the loss of innocence. Looking back, I shake my head at the lost opportunity that this professor let slip through his fingers. Here he had a chance to not just talk about these themes, but to show real world examples of these themes occurring all around us.

Anyway, the guys I lived with and I stayed up all night watching coverage of the cleanup and recovery efforts in New York City. We had news coverage on all day, every day. Everyone – including me – started caring a lot more about politics and who was trying to do what in our political leadership. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the guys I lived with as well as the students on campus either became Republicans or began voting Republican. It was the general feeling of the nation and that feeling was alive and well on Monmouth University’s campus.

It was a scary and yet fascinating time to be a college student.

And it was only ten years ago. On the one hand, it feels like September 11th happened yesterday. But on the other hand, the world has changed so much since then. It makes me wonder where we’ll be in another ten years. Hopefully, terrorism will continue to decline over the next ten years and we can – as a global society – begin working towards a stronger world peace. No, not the hippie version of world peace where we’re all holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Instead, I hope we can move towards a real, workable peace that serves to advance the human race as a whole.

Moving in that direction seemed impossible ten years ago. But today it seems like a totally reasonable expectation for the future. What an amazing ten years…

I would equate the Huckabee and Romney speeches to the brilliance of Senator Hillary Clinton’s speech at the DNC. They were powerful, effective, and served their respective purposes.

The talking heads on television kept repeating that “a star was born” during Palin’s speech. One of the channels had Howard Wolfson (former leader in the Hillary Clinton campaign) who suggested that Barack Obama bring his A-game to combat the McCain-Palin ticket. In fact, Wolfson had nothing but positive words to say about Palin to the extent that it was almost awkward.

Palin’s line of the night: “Some people use change to advance their careers, others use their careers to advance change.” WOW! Talk about knocking home a grand slam! That line will probably be the best line to come out of the entire convention and possibly this entire campaign (on both sides). Amazing – absolutely gorgeous speech writing.

Now, whether you agree with that ideology or not is up to you, but I thought Governor Palin’s speech was perfect. And I’m glad that those stupid Greek columns were bashed – man, I hated those things!

But let’s not overlook Rudy and his contribution tonight. He made such a great speech that I was very concerned about anyone’s ability to follow him. He had the crowd in the palm of his hand and even his off-the-cuff comments were dead on accurate. The most memorable part of his speech had to be when he mentioned that Senator Barack Obama was a community organizer and he giggled afterwards – drawing a similar reaction from the crowd. His comment of, “What?” was the perfect accent to the crowd’s reaction.

However, I’m not very comfortable with people bashing the concept of being a community organizer. I actually DO know what a community organizer is and what they do on a daily basis and it’s a much-needed occupation in many of the downtrodden places of our nation. That said, I’ve seen and worked with a large number of community organizers in my current and previous careers and organizing communities is NOT a good foundation to build a Presidential campaign on. Granted, the Obama folks have never made this claim, but the Republicans have masterfully made his previous occupation an issue. Good move.

All in all I think the Republicans have had a great convention even though it got off to a slow start. And I can’t reiterate enough how showstopping Governor Palin was in her speech. Brilliant.

Funny, everyone will say Romney is done for coming in second, but Hillary is fine with third? I’ll make this short, because Iowa only proved one thing – the Republicans are in big trouble.

The energy and participation is off the charts on the Dem side. It went up on the Republican side due to the Evangelical vote. That’s great, but it isn’t enough to win a general election.

The fact is, as things stand, the Republicans don’t have a candidate that can win nationally in 2008.

This is dead on target. Obama is going to turn a lot of the established Democratic heads with the amount of younger support and independent excitement that he brings to the table in this Presidential race. And as a guy who generally does not vote for the Democrats, I’m even excited about something new coming from Barack Obama – though I’m not quite sure what his exact policies are and how they would have a direct effect (if any) on me.

It seems that the Riehl World View post is correct and that Republicans are lacking both excitement and new participation. There really is no, “Oh my God, I have to go vote for this person,” candidate on the Republican side. The only one that comes close is Ron Paul and he’s more of an old school, late 1800’s/early 1900’s conservative (we call them Libertarians today) than he is a modern-day Republican.

While on this topic, I also want to comment that if you’re paying attention and watching the Republican race you can see that the voters WANT someone to be excited about and someone to be jumping up and down over. The majority of voters were disenfranchised with Rudy Giuliani going into the race and then they discovered Mitt Romney and you saw some excitement. Then the voters learned more about Romney and how he’s more of a return to politics as usual and you saw the excitement transfer to Mike Huckabee. Now you’re seeing some of that excitement transfer to John McCain in New Hampshire, but the fact still remains that Obama is bringing new and younger voters out to voice their opinions. No one else is doing that in either party, period.