sigh. another september eleventh. this september eleventh was beautiful. a clear, warm, blue-skied day. just like the one two years ago.

for two years, we've heard the stories of that day. the people who died at work. the people who died on airplanes. the man who died because he happened to have a meeting at cantor fitzgerald at 9.30 on 9/11/2001. it was written in his datebook, lying on his desk in the office he should have been in. the hundreds of people who were running late to work that day, or called in sick, or took an earlier flight, and survived. yesterday i heard an interview with three people who took the last elevator down from the windows on the world restaurant. they had breakfast there every morning. they knew the hostess, the other regulars. they finished their coffee and got on the elevator at 8.30. they were walking away from the building when the first plane hit. what if they had gotten another cup of coffee? stopped in the restroom? that's what gets me. the people whose lives were affected (one way or the other) by a chance decision. just chance.

we've heard so many stories. the dead, the lucky, the heros. i wonder when i'll stop tearing up when i hear those stories. is this how my grandparents' generation felt about pearl harbor?

news stories yesterday (stories today were about the dead and their families) talked about families having trouble deciding whether to apply to the victim's fund or sue. at first, i felt that the people suing were greedy. but then i heard one widow say that she just wanted to be able to ask her questions in open court on the record. how did the hijackers get through airport security with weapons? why had the government not known these men were (probably) terrorists? how come, only days after the attack, government officials zeroed in on a particular flight school and siezed their records, but told one widow that the reason they hadn't found the terrorists prior to the attack, even though they knew about the idea of terrorists using planes as weapons, was because there were thousands of flight schools and they didn't know which one the terrorists were training at?

a man who lost his wife, on the other hand, applied to the victim's fund because he just wants to move on. he doesn't want to take time away from his 2 kids to spend hours in a courtroom reliving his tragedy. he doesn't want the terrorists to take more of his life.

i see both sides. i think i would fit into the second group, but i see both sides. the only people who i don't agree with are the ones that complain that the money they get is not enough. they say that the government is responsible. they want the government to pay *more*. i think they should realize that while the government should have had a better idea of what those terrorists might do, they couldn't know that 4 planes were going down (neither could the airlines), and providing any money was generous. their loved one could just as easily (more easily, actually) gotten in a car accident and been just as dead, and the government wouldn't have given them anything. and they wouldn't have expected it to. what happened that day sucked. threw lives into chaos and despair. but having our lives suck with chaos and despair is a risk we take just by being alive.