I skipped the great blogger and alt-media tradition of writing a look back at 9/11 on the anniversary. Everyone else beat me to it - and let's be honest, my memories of the day were pretty much like those of everyone who wasn't in New York or DC that morning; dropping the kids off at school, and driving to work.
Oh, I do have one pretty intense memory of an insight I had - I'd been out of radio for eight years at that point, but the experience gave me my first inkling something was terribly wrong; I tuned into NPR's "Morning Edition" and heard perhaps the most jarring thing in the natural world; NPR hosts trying to ad-lib around an unscripted situation. To paraphrase Fred Thompson in Hunt for Red October, NPR air talents don't, er, relieve themselves without a script. Listening to them trying was a little like hearing T-Pain trying to sing without Auto-Tune - a jarring experience that never occurs in nature. I knew something had to be terribly wrong - and I was right.
But for the rest of the day, my experience was probably like yours; sitting at work, frantically searching for information as the internet creaked to a halt and the networks ad-libbed their way through all the things they didn't know, mixed with the stuff we could plainly see.
And then trying to explain it to my kids that night.
The most striking images for me, personally, were the next day - first, around liunch time, walking out into the parking lot outside my office and seeing contrails in the air - not the laser-straight tracks of jetliners seeing the shortest distance through the stratosphere between two points, but the twisty, turny paths of Air National Guard F16s from Duluth or Fargo flying combat air patrol high over Minneapolis, with the sky all to themselves.
And the second, most indelible image of all?
I took my kids, then 10 and 8, to soccer practice that evening. Then as now, I lived in the Midway neighborhood in Saint Paul - one of the most Democrat-heavy districts in one of the bluest cities in the US.
The other parents had the sort of diversity that Alan Dershowitz described at Harvard Law School; different genders and even a few different races, but all of them liberal middle-class Democrats; government workers, public employee union staffers, University of Minnesota staff, teachers and the like - the sort of people that are disproportionately still wearing masks alone while walking down the street today. I was the only conservative in the group, and possibly the only one for half a mile around.
As I stood around with the other parents, trading awkward small talk about a world turned upside down, a low rumble in the south started, and. quickly crescendoed so loud we all looked up at the sky - some audibly alarmed at the sound of jet engines, after the previous day's events.
Seconds later, a couple of F-16 fighters, likely heading home to Duluth, roared directly over us, probably 400 feet off the ground, moving fast.
And I cheered; it'd be a few years before yelling "MURCA" became a thing, but I had the spirit of it down
And I looked around at that pack of vegetarian bike-commuting NPR-listening Garrison Keillor-idolizing Hillary-worshipping Gore-voting neighbors.
And they were cheering, too. The women were applauding. The men were pumping their fists - maybe for the first time ever, finding fierce war whoops for likely the first and I'd suspect the last time in their lives. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to this town as a community since the 1991 World Series.
And it felt good. Like Americans should feel when we're under attack.
Today is by any objective measure the best time to be a human being on this planet in history. For the first time in humanity's experience, obesity is a bigger problem than famine even among the world's poorest people - something literally nobody was predicting when I was 8 years old.
And I spent a depressing stretch of time last Thursday scrolling what the residents of our digital neighborhood had to say about the murder of Charlie Kirk - as direct an attack on our way of life, especially our tradition of free speech, since the World Trade Center still stood.
And I wondered if this generation of parents - like my kids, who aren't a whole lot younger than I was on 9/11, and have kids of their own today - will ever know the feeling of standing in a crowd of people, some like them and some not at all, and feel that for once, maybe the first time, we've all got the same purpose in mind?
As I watch the reactions to Wednesday's atrocity, it feels about as likely as another Twins World Series win.
