Every time someone asks, “Where were you on 9/11?” It feels like a deeply personal question has been asked. As if someone was asking something intimate, a secret. The thoughts and emotions of that day, and the days that followed, were deeply personal. A whole nation had to come to terms with our vulnerabilities – as a country and as individuals – in a way we never had. It was an attack on a collective with intensely personal experiences.

Some people talk of that day and can come off as if they want to be a part of it some much that they dig hard to find a personal connection with it. “Well, I knew a guy whose brother knew a guy whose sister dated a guy who went to kindergarten with a guy that saw the building collapse.” Or, “I would have been on that very flight 9 years earlier… can’t believe I could have died on that plane.”

It’s been twenty years, and many 9/11’s have come and gone. But this one, this twentieth year, has hit me like none before. Not sure why. I don’t care to relive that day nor to recount my story. I experienced that day, so many years back, to the fullest. And at the end of the day, my experience is nothing more than a rounding error on the scale of life.

Much has happened since that September morning. Slogans of defiance have been turned into clichés. Men who stood up to the task of leadership on that day have become parities of themselves.
Hero’s have been mythologized, and victims eulogized. The cause for justice politicized. And while our enemies were defeated, new ones have taken their place. We said we’d “never forget,” but we have.

Seems like every generation has moments that define them, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, 9/11, COVID. Peel back each event, and it reminds us that no matter how public, how collective the experience, in the end, it is always a deeply personal and intimate experience. No slogan or retelling of those events will change that fact. These events have one thing in common, they shape us whether we like it or not. We have as much control over their effects on us as we do of the events themselves. And that shaping of us is deeply personal, intimate.

Twenty years. Once experience. A rounding error on the scale of life.

John Daniels, a Kitty Hawk North Carolina resident took the photo of the Wright brother’s first flight, said of the brothers:

They were the “workingest boys I ever knew…It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense”

from How Innovation Works and why it flourishes in freedom by Matt Ridley

The notion of fake it till you make it has become too prevalent in our culture. So much so that what passes now as vision, leadership, excellence, and innovation is garbage because it is fake. When you fake it till you make it you are still faking it.

I think the mind-numbing state of affairs we are in is in large part a result of faking it till you make it. And when real problems demanded real vision, leadership, excellence, and innovation we have been left with a vacuum cause all we had/have is fake.

There is no substitute for hard work. And the Wright Brothers demonstrated that hard work, inspired by a vision, helped them settle for nothing short of excellence. And that fueled a level of innovation that all the money in the world failed to deliver on — just look up Samuel Pierpont Langley.

I have updated my stack of podcast to listen to that will take over what use to be my news viewing practice. Im listing them below. The list is heavily libertarian and I need to add a conservative and liberal podcast to balance out my information gathering and help me, to the best of my abilities, preempt cognitive dissonance.

• The Fifth Column
• Joe Rogan
• Lex Fridman
• Andrew Sullivan
• Coleman Hughes
• Dan Carlin

News Sources

As for news sources I’m sticking to:

• Bloomberg
• The Economist
• The Wall Street Journal

I find all other news sources too far off on their political bias. As I type Ive come up with an idea for rating news organizations similar to the way countries are assigned a credit rating of AAA when they are stable and trustworthy to full-fill their financial commitments. I’ll follow up with a post on what I settle on.

I found this seemingly blasé article disturbing because this is how erasing history starts—one “inconsequential” item at a time.

“Two German WWII tombstones at a Texas veterans cemetery — each bearing Nazi swastikas — have been removed and replaced with new ones that do not use the symbol.”

NYPOST.com

I’ve heard some of the reasons for the removal and replacing of these tombstones and found them to be nothing but straw men arguments:

• Racist will flock to these sites — they can do so in their living rooms or garages.
• It’s offensive to X people — being offended is not a protected right.

While reading this article, it reminded me of the fire chiefs monologue in Fahrenheit 451 (I’ve only included a small part of it, you can find the full speech here):

“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!

Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals”

A free society should not give in to pressures to erase our history. No matter how painful, violent, or embarrassing, we have to develop methods to cope and learn from past events, not hide them.

At first, glance, who gives a shit about two dead nazis? I certainly don’t. But where does it stop? Who decides what goes and what doesn’t?

If you haven’t read Fahrenheit 451 do yourself a favor and do so now.

Of the tree of knowledge
In the shadows of its memories
Stands the unsubmissive man

Mankind knew the legend 
Glory begins with eating the forbidden fruit
Adam was condemned 

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Torn by vultures because of his courage
Prometheus chained to a rock
He had stolen from the gods

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Of the tree of knowledge
In the shadows of its memories
Stands the unsubmissive man

Assessment requires more effort
He makes the assessment that requires the least effort
But effort was necessary
And he was wrong
He was wrong