Remember, remember ....

Was catching up on a friends blog and realized: Oh, it's the 11th. And so I thought about the day a bit.

I remember being woke up by a phone call from a friend, telling me to turn on the tv. I did, and stared at the screen,and asked her if it was a movie. She kept telling me to wake up and that it was happening. I realized I actually had never thought about said centre before,not really known it existed. The first thing I said was, "So, when do the conspiracies start?"

After, I went downtown (I was living in Ottawa then) and the entire core was silent, the mall almost empty. I got some food, and the manager at the fast food place told me she'd sent everyone home early, and was about to close up for the day. I went past a closed bar,and people clustered about a tv still on, silent, watching it.

I thought about fear, and the response to it. And what would drive people to what the terrorists did. I wondered at foreign policies that made terrorism a logical response, and thought more about hate and fear on the way home.

I look back, now, and the fear won. The terrorists won. Any victory against them was Pyrrhic at best. It doesn't have to win, not in the end. But after a war that couldn't be won and another that should never have been I wonder about what the end of this will be like, what historians will say ... and where they will be silent.