Thursday, September 11, 2003
9/11
Two years ago, I was attending a national meeting of Medicare Quality Improvement Organizations (link to the 2003 edition of the same conference here), in Hunt Valley MD, a suburb of Baltimore. As we listened to a breakout session on CMS data structures, someone walked into the room, whispered for a moment to the speaker, then announced to the assemblage that the WTC had been hit.
The meetings continued—sorta—until Friday morning. What time wasn’t spent in front of the bigscreen TV screen set up in one of the meeting rooms was spent frantically surfing the web for information while ostensibly participating in software training sessions. No one paid much attention to the research paper presentations, even though they continued to take place. We went through the motions of participating in our meetings and the training sessions, went out for dinner (though many nearby restaurants were shut down for the next night or two), mixed at the conference mixers, and had cocktails at the conference cocktail parties. All while our attention and our astonishment and our foreboding fell elsewhere.
We were, for the most part, a captive audience. The meeting was scheduled to run until Friday morning, so most of us hadn’t planned to fly home until Friday afternoon, by which time some air traffic was beginning to pick up. My two colleagues from Washington were both able to fly back to Seattle with relatively little difficulty that day, though I heard different stories from others. Many people, like travelers everywhere, drove their rental cars back home ... as I understand it, that included at least part of the Oregon contingent.
I had planned to visit my brother in Bucks County PA after the meeting, so I wasn’t scheduled to fly until Sunday. Still, transit from Maryland to Pennsylvania on Friday seemed like a daunting effort. I had originally planned to just hop onto an Amtrak train to Philadelphia, but every single spot on every single train was occupied and waitlisted and waitlisted again. Luckily, one of my friends from a New England state was driving back home in his Alamo rental, and he kindly offered to give me a lift. In fact, he took me right to my brother’s door, so I didn’t need to connect to a SEPTA commuter train or any such thing.
By Sunday, when I took to the air from Allentown PA, air service was still in a shambles but was at least operating. The ABE airport was nearly empty when I arrived there for my flight, and so too was my plane to Pittsburgh. I had an upgrade, so I walked to the gate when they called the first class passengers. Before I could walk 20 feet and hand my ticket to the agent, the announcement of “all rows” was made. There were no more than 20-25 people on that 737. Similarly, my Pittsburgh-Seattle flight was less than half-full, even though it was the first plane to fly that route since Tuesday, and even though many of the (few) passengers were people who had originally been scheduled on earlier-in-the-week flights.
Yes, my 9/11 experience was mundane, and yes, it’s pretty uninteresting. I’m grateful that I wasn’t directly and personally confronted by the horrors that befell so many. However, I have been directly affronted by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Don Rumsfeld, Tom Delay, and their whole sick crew, with their callous exploitation of the events of two years ago today. In a mere 730 days, they have utterly transformed my country into a place I couldn’t have imagined, a place so alien to everything I knew the United States to stand for and to represent that it still boggles the mind.
It’s not (yet) too late to take back our country. Decency, freedom, and dignity still exist in our land. But we must act quickly to reestablish our country to its course. If the 2004 election ends up with the same monsters still running the show, then it may indeed be too late to wrench us away from the disastrous heading on which the Bushies are hellbent to take us and the entire world.
