Thang Nguyen 555

We will never get another 9/12, the day after 9/11.

That day saw even cut-throat media agencies share film footage, Texan barbecues for free 24/7 on Ground Zero and the Wall-Street hustlers help carry a disabled lady and her wheelchair down 46 stairs….to be loaded onto an emergency vehicle (to later retell to CBS) before the tower collapsed. Office workers or street people, Black and White, all covered in dust, all wanted to get out of there to fight another day.

We will never get another day of being One (even after we have completely rebuilt One-World Tower).

Those days, even kids had their hands on their chests saluting and paying respects as firefighters’ funerals passed by.

Who said America is all bad!

But then, things had a way to unravel….

Anchor (of ABC) died of lung cancer.

Football idol enlisted, served and died.

The aftermath… took our Peter Jennings and Pat Tillmans.

The exploitation and mis-handling of our new century crisis e.g. waterboarding, wmd….

Instead of optimizing the good will of nations, instead of putting forth long-term and sustained strategies to avert and proactively deal with future crises (such as home-grown terrorists); we ended up digging ourselves in longer-term quagmires, ones which made NAM like midgets in comparison (the rise of ISIS, the return of the Taliban).

Talking about repercussions.

Of course OBL went into hiding (as it turned out, in plain sight – in a prominent Pakistani neighborhood ….his exit strategy).

Had it not been for the tenacity and persistence of “Dark Zero Thirty” types, OBL would still be at large, his pictures still on the most-wanted list.

We need closure. We need to bookend this thing: 20 years for four planes, 5 years per plane.

The plus side: US Armed forces more integrated, more agile, more outsourced and high-tech (night vision, drones….)

(my own opinion: China enjoyed its decades-long peace time, not squandered even a minute to become world’s indispensable and advanced manufacturing and supply-chain). Opportunity missed.

It’s as if a crisis on Wall Street flared up an opportunity on Main Street, unfortunately, Main Street, China.

Meanwhile, Main Street USA welcomes tent cities, homeless people, and many young men of opioid, hash, ammo and porno, conspiracy theories, fast foods and fast cars both sides of the financial crisis (2008) and the pandemic (2020).

Nobody seems to notice the 24/7 crowd-sourcing ghost work to aid machine learning, of AI, of Climate Change…. and kids growing up, going to college ( an inflated proposition) where tuition hike is at its peak, and quality of instructions and employability at its lowest ( e.g. ITT or Trump University).

What is going on with doctors who can’t communicate (with empathy), stock traders with no ethics, athletic trainers who sexploited young female gymnasts and priests choir boys?

Do we need another proverbial 9/11 to shake us to the core, to help us rediscover our souls and compassion for the less fortunate? Do we stop mid-flight, to help carry that disabled lady and her wheelchair, when all around are jumpers?

Our memory needs re-set, and our compass re-calibrated. I might lament and feel a bit melancholic and melodramatic.. for the untapped potential of America…for the wasted opportunity of America…and for our compassion fatigue which I have seen and received, and I in turn have passed it on.

We can do better. It lays there, dormant. Any time now, full throttled humanity and unity could show up once again, like a long lost friend, to shepherd us through and beyond crisis of any proportion.

When other nations (Haiti, Cuba, Syria, South Africa etc..) confront their own 9/11, they look up to America ( by forming a line in front of US Embassy) for help, for vaccines and for leadership. A house divided (like Texan Democrats vs Texan Republicans – or infrastructure bill that faces hurdles) can and will go nowhere, except for pot holes and grid outage.

It’s ironic that our resolve to revenge is stronger than our resolve to do the right thing rightly at the right time.

Now is that time, to emerge from the bunker…to breathe in and say “Let’s roll”…(and take down those who are harming us…in flight or online, foreign or domestic). P.S. Todd Beamer’s last words and his death not in vain when he and other passengers rushed the UA93 terrorists who tried to set the hijacked fourth plane on course to symmetrically crash Washington D.C.