We Shall Never Forget

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. 
I have absolutely no rights to the composite nor the individual images. See wikipedia.org. 

There will be much written and spoken this 13th year after the ignominious attacks by terrorists upon the USA. They were not the first, nor will the be the last. Unlike those that came before, we watched the September 11, 2001 attacks live, in high resolution color, in every way and from any direction possible. In horror.

My wife woke me shortly after the first airliner struck the World Trade Center. We watched with the rest of the nation as the second plane struck the other tower. We watched in inevitable horror, shock and resignation as the terrorists piloted a third jet into the Pentagon. The crash and disintegration of the fourth passenger plane in a field in Pennsylvania was a bitter aftermath to the horror of the morning and early afternoon's carnage.

While I have aged along with everyone else since then, the nightmare images persist in memory. Their immediacy, the feeling of helplessness to affect the outcome of the events of the day rage in my chest today as they did then, replacing the calm strength and vitality that once were my stock-in-trade response to tragedy and chaos as a firefighter and medic.


I shall not forget unto my dying day. Will you?

Foolish Penguin...

Too hot to work, so just napping. Got to hit the road, real soon now.

Echoing Sentiment Heard On Letterman ...

Labour Day, 2014

Dear Mrs. Clinton,

It is given that you will run for President of the United States again in 2015. Like Adlai Stevenson (RIP), you won't win, for all the wrong reasons. You do yourself a grave disservice, assuring defeat, by being out and about, punditing your way through TV interviews ostensibly about your new book. Cut it out. We all know you are angling to be nominated. Give it a rest. You will be nominated.

So, give us all a break -- take your miscreant husband and go on vacation in the Bahamas for, oh, say, a year or so. We'll like you a whole lot more in your absence than we will with Clintons crunching underfoot every time we turn around.

Oh, and Rick Perry? If you are really serious about running, which I doubt, stay home and keep your mouth shut for the next year, too. Just saying...

Now I Know What I Would Look Like With A "Perm"!