Where were you on 9-11?

I remember waking up, getting ready for English class. It was my second week of my freshman year of college. Before leaving to catch the bus to the other campus, I was checking the primussucks.com bullitan board, as was my habit at the time. There were several posts about the "airline accident" in NYC, and then suddenly, there were posts of a second plane hitting. It was probably a few minutes after 9am. My class didn't start until 10:30am.

I ran downstairs to see what was going on on the news. I sat there watching in disbeleif. I had become friends with the RD of the dorm, and I ran and got her, because I figured she ought to know.

She and I sat there watching as the towers burned. I remember watching as the first tower fell in total disbelief. I already knew at that time that a steel structure building had never collapsed due to fire. I imagined all the people's lives inside being extinguished in a horrible instant, and my could feel my heart fall to the floor with the tower.

Cookie, the RD turned to me and said, "I would hate to be president right now." I looked at her in disbelief, and asked if she was kidding. I looked back at the television and said, looking into the smoke, "for at least a year after something like this, you could pass whatever laws you wanted to. If he wants to the Senate to declare war, he can declare war on whomever he wants. Nobody will question the President during a crisis like this."

Looking back, I don't know how I knew that. I'm not a Machiavellian person myself. Studying history, probably, knowing how we interned the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Knowing how we had the Red Scare during the 1950s. I was too young at the time to understand the Gulf War, but I knew enough by the time Clinton was in office that I was against Clinton bombing Iraqi aspirin factories during the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a distraction. I had followed the 2000 election quite closely as a Senior in high school, watched as it was stolen, and was convinced that G.W. Bush wanted to declare war on somebody. I even have a letter I was assigned to write myself as a Sophomore in College writing to my self as a Senior about what the future holds for me. It scares me a little now, but I said in that letter, half joking, "with George W Bush in office, we're sure to be at war with somebody by now, for no good reason." There was an inevitability I felt about it. Perhaps I was just that jaded.

Sitting there watching as the remaining tower burned, both of us not knowing what to do, Cookie looked back at me after my comment with tears and bit of anger in her eyes, visibly upset by what I'd said, and understandably. She said then, what I would come to agree with in the following October, when the congress passed the USAPATRIOT act. She said then, sitting next to me, "I hope you're wrong."

I wish I had been too.

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