(The way things used to be. Photo Wikipedia)

The usual suspects are pretty wound up this morning. We have been back and forth about the President’s Speech last night, the media coverage of it, the Million Muslim March that is supposed to happen later this afternoon on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the successful recall of the two Senators in Colorado who supported some relatively modest gun control measures.

I could give you the coverage of each one- I have point-by-point analysis on the three issues- but I won’t.

Suffice it to say, the Syrian Strike appears to have evaporated into a miasma of UN and Russian-controlled machinations. The President is out of the corner in which he had painted himself, and to that end, everything is fine.

The recall of the legislators in Colorado is surprising, and largely financed by about equal levels of out-of-town cash- a third of a million each from the NRA and Mayor Bloomberg. The margins of the elections were narrow, but seem to reflect dissatisfaction with the agreed “common sense” narrative. But of course we have talked about the real meaning of those words before.

The March scheduled for later this afternoon is expected not to number in the hundreds of thousands. Closer to a couple hundred people are supposed to participate, according to Metro Police estimates. The number of marchers is expected to be dwarfed by nearly 3,000 motorcycles, who intend to shadow the procession, revving their engines.

Let’s get this all out of the way. I support the First Amendment, and however bone-headed and disrespectful the timing of the demonstration may be, it is their right to peacefully express their views. Just as it is the right of the bikers to rev their engines.

But just thinking about the significance of this day is enough to make me sink into a reverie. My son is off for Asia, haze gray and underway at the same time the marchers will be protesting what they claim is the unconstitutional profiling of Muslim Americans.

A dozen years ago I was still uniform, and having a staff meeting on the sixth floor of the original headquarters building at Langley. We had been concerned all summer with the prospect of something bad happening. The long litany of outrages was still fresh then: Khobar Towers, USS Cole, the embassies in East Africa, Pan Am 103, all the way back to disco bombings in Germany and the mass murder of US Marines in Beirut.

I was talking to Marty and Rock in their little office when someone walked by in the passageway from Joan’s office and said that an airplane had hit the Word Trade Center.

So, there it was, the start of one of the worst days in our collective lives.

I had driven to Langley from the District early that morning. It was breathtakingly beautiful in the pre-dawn: the stars were bright, and the moon smiled down as I swung off the ramp from the 14th Street Bridge to cut across Pentagon North Parking.

I had the top down. It was a glorious morning to be alive, and there was nothing in the gentle wind to suggest that 2,977 fellow citizens and hopeful immigrants would not live to see lunchtime.

I have talked before about what happened as the vast bureaucracy became aware that we were under attack. I am not sure the whole story has been told yet, and my small part in it meant disappearing into a very deep hole until we were relatively confident, several weeks later, that the new normal had been established.

I don’t like it much. The bastards that did this took a lot away from us, and I am not certain we will ever get it back.

As the memorial ceremonies are held today in lower Manhattan, and at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, PA, I fall into a reverie.

I have been to all three sites now, each one replete with its poignant story.

Shanksville may be the one that chilled, inspired and saddened me the most, though it was the smallest in terms of the number of martyrs. I do not know why it affected me that way; maybe it is because the Trade Center was so thoroughly expunged by the time I got there, scoured down to the native bedrock, and the Pentagon was so resolutely and defiantly restored so effectively that you could not believe that it had happened at all.

The vast field, the tree line, and the wildflowers of that Pennsylvania field got me, but good.

I do not think I uttered a word on the drive from Shanksville to Arlington, nor for a long time afterwards. It was a day just as lovely as this one.

Remember. Remember. Remember.

(President and Mrs. Obama at Shanksville. Photo Politco.)

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303