OFF the BEAT
ROBERT L. SPINKS, MA, MS
COMMENTATOR
A DAY THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOR EVER Published on Wed, Sept 14, 2011 by Robert Spinks, MA, MS http://www.sequimgazette.com/spinks This past weekend marked the 10th Anniversary of the Terrorist Attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on United Flight 93 that became part of the farmlands of Stonycreek Township in Pennsylvania.
many credible attacks. Most of this work goes on silently; as most of us start each day reading our newspaper having our first cup of coffee unaware of the work that goes on to make our country safe. Introspection
The weekend had memorials, TV specials, and articles that were poignant and painful. On Sunday, Sequim Police Chief Bill Dickenson, and Sequim Police Officers Darrell Nelson and Randy Kellas completed a 6,000 mile round trip to bring home to Sequim our own piece of the World Trade Center. That was a project I started a couple years ago when I made application to have Sequim receive a piece of Ground Zero. A tip of the hat goes to Dickenson, Nelson and Kellas for bringing a piece of New York City home to Sequim. In recent days, New York and Washington, D.C., suffered under the haze of "a specific, credible but unconfirmed report that al-Qaida, again, is seeking to harm Americans and in particular, to target New York and Washington," according to the US State Department. Usually, the public never gets to see the intelligence, the threat data or the interdiction of these threats. Over the past 10 years I have sat through intelligence briefings from a host of federal agencies with a lot of alphabet names. Some of those briefings and the intelligence that was shared was scary and was very real. Fortunately, many, many people working across the US and around the world have intercepted
Sunday, I sat and watched on TV as Paul Simon sang „The Sounds of Silence‟ at Ground Zero. That was a song I grew up with, but it now has a totally different meaning for me. It was written in February 1964 by Simon in the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Now listening to Simon sing this song in tribute to 9/11, I realized that this was a song written about the 9/11 attacks . . . it was just written 40 years in advance. The song begins with: “Hello darkness, my old friend I've come to talk with you again Because a vision softly creeping Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence” Another amazing realization; watching one of the 9/11 Special‟s I was struck by a fact I never knew. The evacuation of Manhattan Island on 9/11 involved the largest seaborne evacuation in all of mankind. In just 9 hours, 500,000 people were evacuated from the island
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