Where were you 10 years ago?

I heard about the attacks as I was driving my son to school. We had not turned the TV on that morning which was very unusual. We always watched KTLA 5 Morning News. This day we did not. We heard Rick Dees on KIIS-FM talking about the tragedies in NY and DC. I took my son to school, I asked him if he was okay with that. He said yes. My daughter was in 7th grade and getting ready to walk to middle school when she turned on the TV and saw the 2nd tower fall. She went to school because as she told me later, she was afraid not to. School let out early that day and we watched in horrible fascination as every channel was focused on smoldering ruins. No one knew for certain how many lives had been lost. No one knew if more attacks were to come. Stories would come forth in the coming days of the kindness of people in tiny Canadian cities who made welcome the new refugees who were on planes forced to land when the flying ban went on. How many people made new friends that day? How many people walked aimlessly trying to make sense of the horror? And now 10 years later, what has happened to America?

Our personal freedoms once taken for granted are being eroded in the name of Homeland Security. Grandmothers being strip searched by over zealous "patriots" working for our own government. People are reporting people speaking in a foreign language sitting on a plane. No explanation is given when people are taken off of planes, altering plans, delaying arrivals, because of the paranoia that is fed by Big Brother.  In the meantime our infrastructure has taken a beating by means of hurricanes, tropical storms, floods, tornados, earthquakes. A president asks to rebuild the nation and is rebuffed by his opponents who owe their souls to the company store. These aren't the good old days and they certainly aren't what I imagined as my life as I enter into "my golden years". Nope. Not at all.

As ever, YMMV.