Never Forget

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Well, here it is…the anniversary of the day I lost my previous job, since most of my clients had been headquartered in the World Trade Center.

Schneider had sent a message to all truckers, asking us to show our patriotism by wearing read, white and blue business casual attire today. I'm a truck driver; business casual? What am I supposed to wear, a red cardigan with a white collared shirt and blue slacks?

And, show my patriotism? Uncle Don Schneider, patriotism is something you feel and act on. It's not something to be shown. The appearance of patriotism, without the substance, is what got us into this mess. And waving flags without making changes is what's going to keepus in it.

I drove for hours past the fields in which much of the country's food is grown…and harvested by migrant workers who can barely afford to buy any of it, so the corporations that purchased the land from the banks that foreclosed on it in the 1930s can be further enriched.

Some of those migrant workers may well be the grandchildren of the original owners of that land… after all, California used to be part of Mexico.

And then there's the Native Americans, who owned it before that.

I took I-880 to the Oakland harbor. The air was sweet and salty, even though the buildings were ancient and dilapidated. I had to make two stops; apparently this mustard was far too valuable to rely on just one shipper to move it to the Far East. Although the yards were tight, I was able to maneuver all right—thank Hermes (the ancient Greek god of travel and commerce)!—but as I closed the trailer doors at the second stop, I discovered they had carefully replaced the wooden pallets the product had been shipped on. I now had twelve pallets in my supposedly empty trailer.

I sent a message to my STL and parked outside the yard, across from an abandoned warehouse. There was no one around but it still looked creepy and dangerous, like a scene from a film co-starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Denzel Washington.

While I waited for a reply, I tried my second method of getting decent music in the truck. I had picked up my computer speakers when I was last in Phoenix. I tried connecting them to the laptop, and to the power inverter. Now the problem was, the speakers power plug is its transformer, and I couldn't plug in the laptop and the speakers at the same time because the transformer was wider than an ordinary electrical plug. At least, not until I had gotten an extension cord. However, I could run my laptop off its battery while leaving the speakers plugged into the inverter; that would give me some tunes until the laptop battery died.

The message came in that I could deliver the pallets to a certain Oakland address. I checked for directions on the Microsoft Streets and Trips program on my laptop…only a few blocks from where I was, but the streets looked pretty narrow. Still…

I wondered how laptop-less truckers found their way around. We do get directions on the QualComm, but of course that's text only so not as good.

It was in an downscale neighborhood. The people on the streets were clean and the homes were cared for, if old. Still, the gratings on the first and second floor windows suggested what the place might be like at night.

In the day, though, folks were very helpful, and I needed the help. They alerted neighbors to move their cars when I got stuck on a side street, gave directions from park benches, and ladies called me honey and baby without a trace of animosity or rancor. When I reached the address I'd been given, a man with a forklift came and helped me carry the pallets to the rear of the trailer so he could forklift them away. I notified my STL that the trailer was now, finally, empty (or MT, as we say in the cryptic messages carried by satellite).

Now, all I needed was directions to my next drop off or pick up. But hours passed, and I heard nothing. I sent a message saying that I couldn't remain where I was; although the police were passing me, I knew I wasn't legally parked (I had my flashers going) and I didn't want to have to navigate these narrow streets at night, when the good people retreated behind their grated windows and I was left with the ones outside those grates.

Finally, grimly, I turned on my music and tried to find a freeway entrance.

As I did so, I abruptly left the downscale neighborhood for a more upper-middle-class one. While the faces looked much the same, the homes and cars were far newer. And, in this neighborhood, no one sat at park benches, and car windows were rolled up tight. I couldn't ask directions. I did, finally, spot an entrance to I-680 and got on. I didn't know where it went; I just wanted a truck stop! I followed signs toward Walnut Creek, a town I at least knew of (I had held computer programming classes there in my previous life as an instructor).

Windows Media Player had searched my entire hard disk for sound files, and was playing them in random order. Stuck in I-680 rush hour traffic, I was trying to relax as Judy Collins urged me to Open the door and come on in…I'm so glad to see you, my friend. I considered how welcome I had felt in that lower class neighborhood, and wondered if I had been too hasty to leave. Were my fears justified? Would I have awakened in the morning with no tires on my truck? How well would I have slept? Now, not having tried it, I had no way of knowing for myself.

Then I hit the first wave of overt patriotism. On an overpass over I-680, dozens of people had thronged, holding large flags and waving them over the slow-moving traffic below. A few cars honked their horns in response. We Will Never Forget 9/11/01, the suspended banners proclaimed.

Well, I won't forget it, either. That's what got me into this whole truck drivin' thing.

Michael and I were sound asleep at home when my mom threw open the door and cried, They've hit New York!

Who did what? What do you mean? But Mom was too emotional to be able to convey much actual information. In retrospect, I get that she'd already lived through World War II, so her dismay was understandable.

I was exhausted from having just returned from giving a class somewhere, and had planned to enjoy a week off before the next class somewhere else. But, of course we got up and turned on the big screen projection TV to see what was going on.

From the first moment the broadcasts, on every channel, called it a terrorist attack. It seemed four jets had been hijacked from different airports, simultaneously; one had flown into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and it wasn't yet clear what had happened to the other two. The reporters, and the next day President Bush, kept saying that no one ever imagined! anyone ever doing such a thing.

Except that the same, exact plot had unfolded on the pilot episode of the TV series The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off of The X-Files, just six months before! In the episode, the Lone Gunmen, a trio of conspiracy theorists and hackers who often assisted Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, uncover a government conspiracy to remotely control an airplane and crash it into the World Trade Center. The Lone Gunmen attempt to stop the plot but are faced with challenges as they dig deeper into the conspiracy.

While some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true throughout history, the term conspiracy theory is often used to describe ideas that lack credibility, are not well-supported by evidence, and may be harmful or misleading. Critical thinking, skepticism, and a reliance on evidence-based explanations are essential when evaluating claims that involve conspiracy theories.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they can be used by either side. Certainly few people still believe that Lee Harvey Oswalk fired the bullet that killed John F. Kennedy; yet there are so many conflicting theories that not even the government bothers to try to debunk them any more.

Weirdly, though it's not very scientific, one can make a case for the presence of too many, conflicting but equally plausible theories as actually being proof that there was a cover-up.

And one thing no one can reasonable claim, is that there has never been a government cover-up. Every government has had them, for the simple reason that governments are made up of people and people have a natural distaste for looking bad. So if a mistake occurs, it's human nature to try and cover it up. If the mistake is one that kills a lot of people, forcing that government to explain itself, it's again human nature for whoever made the mistake to double down on the false explanation, which will usually convince that person's friends to publicly support him or her.

But one thing will separate the conspiracy theories, regardless of origin: Actual evidence. Lazy-minded people basically believe anything that tends to agree with what they already believe, at face value. Most conspiracy theories collapse the moment one tries to validate them, by looking up the details. Once upon a time that was pretty much impossible for a normal person to do. Now, with the Internet, it can at least be accomplished; but we still have to validate the validation. For example, I've noticed that conservative news sites seem to all quote each other, never actually stating an original source; whereas other sites (especially respected newspapers and award-winning journalists like CNN) let you know where the information actually came from. I've also noticed that, while when CNN makes a mistake they announce it as soon as they know, conservatives sites never admit to being wrong. Ever.

The term false flag operation refers to deceptive actions carried out by a party with the intent of making it appear as though another party is responsible. The use of the word flag denotes the fact that it is usually a government that secretly conducts these, to garner public support for a war the people otherwise would have resisted. For example, the Incident at Piraeus in 365 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the Spartan general Callistratus hired Persian mercenaries to launch an attack on the Athenian-controlled port of Piraeus. The idea was to create confusion and mistrust among the Athenians by making it seem as though the Persians, rather than the Spartans, were responsible for the attack.

More recently, the Gleiwitz incident, a Nazi false flag operation that occurred on the night of August 31, 1939, on the eve of World War II. German operatives, dressed in Polish uniforms, attacked the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland). The goal was to create the appearance of a Polish assault on German territory, providing Adolf Hitler with a pretext to justify the invasion of Poland the next day.

So in the next few months, I paid close attention to information as it came in; and I did my best to validate it all.

Vice President Dick Cheney scheduled four different war games or military exercises on September 11, 2001, some of which involved scenarios simulating hijacked aircraft. One of the exercises was known as Vigilant Guardian, and it involved simulated scenarios of hijacked planes in the northeastern United States.

Now, that Vigilant Guardian was scheduled for the very day that real terrorists would actually do that exact thing, is either a mind-blowing coincidence on a par with the Universe coming into existence out of nothing, or evidence of a conspiracy. It is not neccessarily evidence that Dick Cheney was in on it; but either he was, or an aide who suggested it to him was, or somehow Al-Qaeda, a transnational extremist militant group that originated in the late 1980s and gained global attention for its involvement in various terrorist attacks, got hold of the schedule and timed their attacks to coincide.

I can allow that Lone Gunmen episode to have inspired Al-Qaeda. I can't believe that their choice of date was a coincidence.

But a look at George Bush's face when he was interrupted from reading to schoolkids with the news, does not show a man who is astonished, as much as it shows a man thinking, "Holy shit! He really did it."

And, true to form for a false flag operation, we declared war on a country that literally had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, the hijackers, or the attack just days later. And on September 12, no aircraft were allowed to fly at all…except for flights which took members of the Bin Laden family who were in the United States, to Saudi Arabia. And the FBI hadn't yet even identified the culprit yet!

So, yeah, I don't generally fall for conspiracy theories. But remember: Every crime involving more than one person, is, by definition, a conspiracy. And 9/11 falls under that definition.

And the fact remains that NORAD, which normally would have shot down any hijacked jet that seemed to be aimed at New York, or Washington, didn't…because they'd been warned there would be war games involving hijacked airplanes in the northeast!

Anyway, as I was sitting behind the wheel fuming about all this anew, suddenly, and I swear I am not making this up, I heard my minister's voice in the cab! It took me a moment to realize that I also have the church web site on my laptop; one of the files there happens to be Walt's previous year's sermon from the Sunday after 9/11/01. Windows Media Player had searched for, and found, every sound file on the computer…and its shuffle feature had chosen this moment to play Walt's sermon. It's now been…what? Six days since the attack on the World Trade Towers. I have no answers…

The irony is, Walt, my Unitarian Universalist minister, doesn't believe in coincidences or that any higher power guides our lives…yet, what are the odds against this recording, which I didn't even realize I had, playing at just this moment?

The sermon, written well in advance of the President Bush's ill-named Patriot Act, warned of giving away our civil rights in response to a loss of security. If we are willing to die for freedom, Walt considered, then we ought to be willing to be afraid for it.

The final overpass in the Oakland area only had two people on it. They each flew a flag, but not a US flag. They were not United Nations flags, either. They were home-made, a picture of Earth on a blue background. The people carried no banners, no signs; but the message was clear.

And the response was heartening. Not just a few cars, but nearly all the cars, blew their horns in hopeful and determined support.