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September 11 and the Cicadas

By Kat on September 11, 2008 | | Comments (1)
I was writing the post below when I looked at the time.  It's September 11. 

I remember that one moment of nearly complete silence after the towers fell.  When dust rolled down narrow canyons like the devil's breath, covering all in ashes.  All those who could had taken cover or been consumed in the cloud. 

For two minutes, nothing moved in the streets.  The ash and smoke were rising.  Every image in the camera was a ghostly outline of buildings, vehicles and people who started moving in slow motion.  Ghostly silent.

Then the chirping sound of the fallen fire fighters' alarms and nothing else.  They reminded me of the cicadas in the summer.  I used to love the cicadas when I was a kid .  We would play in the back yard and catch lightening bugs.  Those were happy times. 

I couldn't listen to the cicadas again for a very long time. 

There are no cicadas today.  Just rain. 

Yeah, that's what it is.  It's just the rain.

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By fdcol63 on September 11, 2008 7:29 AM
From a Lileks column in 2003:
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0903/091103.html
" ... I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t. "

"Which is why this war will be long."