Remembering September 11, 2001, 14 Years Later

I hope that one day we can all get some distance from what happened 14 years ago today.

I will say it was a terrible terrible moment, learning on my car radio about the first plane, and then the second plane, while driving south on Route 128, coming from Exeter, New Hampshire, heading toward a courthouse in Massachusetts where I was to handle a matter in one of my cases. The Neil Young song “Ohio” played on the radio, with that eerie reference to senseless violence in America during the tumultuous conflict of the Vietnam War.

All day the spirits of radio listeners were kept afloat by the strong encouraging words of none other than the humorist, and usually trash-talking, Howard Stern. And it was a further terrible time driving around Massachusetts that day because I had to go to another courthouse in Western Massachusetts, to gather materials for an appellate brief I was preparing. And on the way out there it was a terrible moment to be passed by a speeding motorcade that I later learning was carrying Governor Jane Swift of Massachusetts to some secure place.

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These were terrible moments, like when I was driving north on Interstate 95 near Newburyport and a renegade vehicle came barreling down the wrong side of the highway towards me, and instead of realizing it was probably a drunk driver, I assumed it was a terrorist, trying to do something else to all of us.

And when I got home that evening to my beautiful family, my wife and young sons, I went straight to a department store to buy Power Rangers action figures for my sons so they would know that in this life you need to fight back when something horrible like this happens to your country.

I am saying all this because I don’t want us to forget that moment, that in that moment of dire happenings, that we had to pull together and stay together, and fight back for ourselves and our children and our families and not fight against each other as we have all been doing far too much lately, especially here in New Hampshire with all the political talk of elections that in the end are not important for who wins them but simply for the fact that we have loud, vociferous, but peaceful, elections and not recurring violence or internal terrorism.

Those are just my thoughts 14 years after that terrible day.