Six years ago this morning I was training for a marathon. I woke up before dawn in Maui and decided that I would go for a veryveryvery long run before DearSweetDave woke up and get my training for the day out of the way. We had arrived in Maui the day before and we were staying in my favorite house in Maui Meadows. Our trip had gotten off to what we thought was a rather auspicious start because when we arrived there was no water at the house, or in the entire neighborhood it turned out, and while we could still "stay" there, we couldn't use any of the facilities.
While I was on my long run that took me down through Maui Meadows and into Wailea and then along the coast highway and into Kihei, I was slowly picking up snips and pieces of people's televisions and radio broadcasts. I found it slightly odd that at this very early hour of the morning, before dawn in Maui, there were already folks who were watching television and who were listening to their radios but then there are many folks in Maui who work in the service industry and I at first was thinking that these were the folks who were getting up to go make the tourists their breakfast.
The longer and further I ran, however, the more persistent the broadcasts from televisions and radios became and soon the snipets I was hearing started to weave together. A plane had been hijacked. Another plane had crashed. All air traffic was grounded. Planes were falling from the skies. There was a state of emergency. The President had been informed. As I kept running, I was trying to wrap my head around what all of this could mean. A plane had crashed? A plane had been hijacked? A state of emergency? I honestly wondered to myself what madman in what foreign country had decided that he had just had "enough" of America and had commandeered an international flight and was making some sort of outrageous demands?
When I got home, I woke DearSweetDave up and told him that I thought perhaps a plane had crashed. I also said that while we had agreed that we wouldn't be watching television while we were on vacation, that I thought we should turn on the television at the house just to see what had happened because whatever it was it sounded like it was pretty serious.
We walked into the living room. We turned on the television. The picture flickered into focus. The Twin Towers fell to the ground. I immediately burst into tears. My brother, John, worked in those buildings. On one of the top floors. Surely he was now in the rubble.
Without knowing any more information about hijacked planes, about the plane that had hit the Pentagon, about Washington, D.C. being a target, about the whole big sordid plan, I turned to DearSweetDave and we both said, almost simultaneously, "George Bush did this."
Six years have passed. A lot of conspiracy theories are still being hypothesized about the truth of the events of September 11, 2001. There are many among us who refuse to believe that our own government could have possibly been complicit in such heinous crimes against our own citizens. And then there are others among us who believe that our own government is absolutely capable of exactly these crimes and worse.
I actually do not know what the truth is and in all honesty I have not gone seeking it. I will say this. I love my country. But I fear my government. I do not trust the people that we have in power or the people that they have empowered in my name. I know that change begins with me. So I will continue to live my life in truth, in honesty and most importantly, in love. And I will encourage all of you to do the same.
Always in love.
