Fateful flights

When firefighters, broadcasters and stockbrokers on Wall Street went about their daily routine in a crisp Fall day 20 years ago, they did not know their fates were linked with today’s thousands in Kabul.

Same aerodynamics that lifted the planes…same desires to work, earn, rest, play and go home to their families.

We all do.

Yet Evil (personified in people we call terrorists) wanted to disrupt what would be “normal”.

In the end, people cling to planes as they lift off.

Back then, people ran away from them as they plunged into the towers and side-walls of the Pentagon.

Normal people. Back from their vacation. Kids back to school. Company (Oracle) Fall kick-off meeting.

Coast-to-coast (Logan – SFA) or Newark-LAX…or what not.

Technology aided. Technology aimed at buildings (designed by a Japanese architect who studied, I surmised, earthquake and other tremors).

Yet it happened. No one had ever thought of the possibilities. Not the intelligence folks. Not the Head of Security of the World Trade Centre (O Neil, happened to be both).

The same thing today. We thought 1 Trillion dollars bought us time. To leisurely evacuate, withdraw or reduce footprints (whatever the euphemism we chose) in order to see the “forever war” reach its end.

Pin it on Ford, for Saigon; Biden Kabul.

But if we zoom out from immediate news-worthy chaos and crisis of the moment, we’ll see the embers of Colonial Empires still glowing and being scattered: from UK, USSR to the US ( who de facto has assumed responsibilities of world policing).

Meanwhile, China sits back and watches. It too has “pissed on all the trees” to claim territories, with Belt and Road initiatives, from Africa to Central Asia. It tries to learn, to cherry pick and play off one alliance against the other (the art of the deal).

So on any given crisp Fall day, firemen better kiss their spouses, place “love-you” notes in kid”s lunch bags, and stockbrokers, forget not the intangibles money can’t buy.

Evil is lurking. Using bad actors and state-sponsored armies. Whether financed via growing their own poppies, or received fund-transfer from an off-shore account, or embezzled public funds…(and most obviously, take the enemies’ arsenal as they had abandoned post), terrorists are advancing, and “Democracy” is pulling back to consolidate and confront future threats (cyber, Russia and China, climate and pandemic).

Yes, we are good at certain things (Leave no one behind, for instance)…but then, the execution of it, we find ourselves short. First plane that hit the North Tower, we all thought it was a commuter plane.

NO ONE understands evil. What bad actors are capable of. And most surprising of all, like a Hollywood twist, Evil has been lurking all along, unsuspecting, like a troop we trained at our expenses.

The chaos and even stampede in Kabul, the lifting-off plane, casts its shadow back in time, on the South Tower’s glass windows 20 years ago. The only difference now..is that, instead of seeing jumpers (out of the towers), we see climbers (and hangers-onto the departing US Airforce cargo plane).

I thought I’d never see another “Vietnam”, another “Fall of Saigon” until today: “Fall of Kabul”. Don’t tell me they don’t have some resemblance. I felt it…I see “dead people”. I fear for more…casualties caused by panic in the middle of a pandemic.

Those fateful flights are just the beginning…of a long climb, also known as upward mobility, convoluting through the American English alphabet to get to Z so as to become the Gates of the world.

God bless not just America, but other people too, those who keep thinking, and often times, are confused between the US and Heaven.