For me, September 11, 2001 began much like any other day during that year.  I was on my way to work (stuck in a traffic jam) at 7:46am CDT, when the first plane hit.  It was a bright, clear morning.  I was listening to the radio when they interrupted the music for breaking news.  They said that an airplane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  A woman was reporting via cell phone and I remember wondering why she was so hysterical.  The possibility of a plane hitting a tall building in New York was always there (like the one that hit the Empire State Building), so I thought it was just an accident.  By the time I got into the office, though, we were getting reports that a second plane had hit.  We didn’t have a TV, so all we had to go on were second-hand reports from others, the radio, and the internet (which wasn’t much use, since the big news sites’ servers were melting under the load).

I just remember that day being a series of surprises and revelations.  I remember thinking that an airplane couldn’t bring down the building itself (somewhere I’d heard that they’d planned for this possibility during the design of the towers), then being surprised when the first tower collapsed.  We later learned that it was the fire that did it.

My most vivid memory of that day was returning home after work.  I had stopped at a light and had the windows down.  Something felt strange and it took me a few seconds to realize that it was too quiet.  We work in the flight path of DFW airport and there are always planes overhead.  This time there were none and their absence was noticeable.

After the initial shock came the crash course on militant Islam as well as the PC brainwashing about the “religion of peace™”.  It took a while to get past that to understand the truth.  At the time I was a pretty hard core libertarian, leaning towards being an anarchocapitalist.  But as I came to learn more about the sick culture that spawned this attack, I came to realize the futility of anything other than a robust military response.  We could withdraw all our forces back to our borders, but we’d still be attacked.  There was nothing to gain from trying to be nice.

Further, as more stories came out about the victims of the attacks my anger grew.  The thing that did it for me was the picture of that little girl who was killed along with her parents on one of the planes.  I kept wondering what kind of sick bastards would view her sacrifice has somehow acceptable.  What kind of disgusting pigs would deliberately target people who were doing nothing more than going about their daily business, harming no one?

I have no intention of “moving on”, or accepting it, or any of that other psychobabble bullshit.  I no longer care about the opinion of the “Arab street” or what the Islamofascists think of us.  Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about them anymore.  And the Palestinians can forget about any kind of support anymore as well.  Those rat bastards cheered in the streets after September 11, 2001.  Before then I thought that they perhaps deserved a chance.  But 9/11 shined a spotlight on their disgusting culture of death and opened my eyes.  Anyone who engages in attacks against us, who encourages those attacks, or who provides any kind of support for those attacks deserves nothing less than death.

I don’t care if they like us or not.  I just want them to understand that attacking us will only get them killed.  Let them hate, so long as they fear.