9/11 17 years on

At a conference, and it was very interesting to watch colleagues scramble to find a way home. Walked down to the lobby at the hotel soon after one tower had fallen, and was very glad to learn that the WTC had contained nowhere near the number of people it could have had there.

Jim, we’d actually made it a family vacation to Yellowstone and some friends in Idaho, so we had the minivan with us already. There was the question of whether we could take a couple of my coworkers with us, too—they found another vehicle. Most of the car rental places were VERY helpful.

What did it change for me? Well, less desire to fly once the federal government decided that the McDonald’s rejects that staffed airport security would be government workers, for starters. Incredulity that nobody would seriously consider what El Al does—pretty much everybody sails through security, but they’ve got criteria that make things very interesting for people with one way tickets, young males of Arab descent, and the like. Incredulity that the federal government would put far more restrictions on a pilot carrying a gun than they would on a pilot flying a ~ 400 ton bomb like a fully fueled 747-400.

Not much of a different view of Muslims—most are not terrorists, and those who are have been messing with aviation for 50 years or so.

I started learning about Islam with a lot of my information coming from co-workers who were Muslim, both Shia and Sunni (and only twice with them at the same time! It made a Presbyterian/Baptist debate look like a tea party!).

Humorously: Watching a government bureaucracy make people take off their shoes and pat down my 80 year old mother in the interest of airline safety.

Amazement: Wondering why there has never been a major terrorist attack at a reasonably “soft” event like the Super Bowl or Fourth of July on the Washington DC Mall.

In Tom Clancy’s book The Sum of All Fears, Islamic terrorists detonated a nuclear weapon at the Super Bowl …

I won’t tell you how old I was 17 years ago, but I certainly wasn’t a pastor then! Hint; I was about the join the Navy …

17 years ago I was in the kitchen of a small diner cooking breakfast before classes at MBBC my senior year. The waitress told me a plane crashed into the World Trade Center and I laughed and said, “You’re crazy.” Then I stepped out to look at a TV and was blown away.

This morning I watched footage online with my children (ages 6-11) and we talked about the shock of that day and the sacrifice of the first responders and passengers on Flight 93. When I showed them the Tower of Voices memorial in Shanksville, PA my 8 year old said, “Maybe we can go there on a field trip!” Might be too far for a day trip, but it’s on the agenda for our next trip out east.

I was in music theory class as a freshman at BJU. I can still see in my mind’s eye the face of the teacher who interrupted class to let us know what was going on. The friend who was sitting on my left was understandably concerned, because at that point we didn’t really know yet what all was affected, and her dad was in DC (maybe at the White House?) with a group of men there for some sort of AACS meeting.

I teach 7th grade now, and none of my students were alive then. Not even my yearbook staff is old enough to remember anything. I assigned my 7th graders to talk to their parents last night about their memories so that we could discuss them in class today.

[TylerR]

In Tom Clancy’s book The Sum of All Fears, Islamic terrorists detonated a nuclear weapon at the Super Bowl …

Technically, the terrorist killed the German bomb maker before he could properly finish the bomb. They got lucky because the bomb fizzled and only blew up the stadium (as opposed to a square mile or two). #clancyfan

If only Elizabeth Elliot had been at the Super Bowl, too …

[Bert Perry]

Incredulity that nobody would seriously consider what El Al does—pretty much everybody sails through security, but they’ve got criteria that make things very interesting for people with one way tickets, young males of Arab descent, and the like.

I’ve been to Israel twice. Once on El Al; once on another airline. Flew El Al round-trip from Chicago O’Hare to Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv) in 1997, 6,200+ miles non-stop each way. Nice, pretty new-at-the-time 747-400 each way.

I was traveling as one of 18 or so in a group from my church. Well, pre-departure at Chicago, a El Al security agent singled me out for some intensive questioning. As a relatively young (then 34), single male, traveling without any relatives/family members, I guess I fit a profile. Anyway, I was “interrogated” for several minutes, as my answers were verified with other members of my group. I was seriously thinking at one point, “They’re not going to let me on this plane!” (And this was pre-9/11.)