9/11 - eight years to the day, I'm back in Dulles airport

september 11, 2001, i was working here at washington d.c. dulles international airport for united airlines... needless to say, it was a day that will be forever burned in my memory... i've posted on the details of that day in previous blog posts (here and here, among others), and i'm not going to repeat them here...

however, once again i find myself in dulles airport on 11 september, eight years on, this time waiting for a flight to london, and i'm stunned at how little things have changed... in many ways, it's as if the clock had been turned back... same gates, same crowds, same godforsaken airline...

here's what i consider to be a solid observation for the day from rebecca solnit at tomdispatch...

Eight years ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word 'terrorism,' which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don't know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it.

it's a sobering day for reflection...

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