9/11 at 25, The “Misery Chick” and Minbari War

I was tempted to write this, what with all the remembrances going on, because I have a bit of a different memory of that day. This is about as good (or bad) a time as any to put it to digital paper and release it into the aether. So here we go…

2001 got off to a weird start that really began for me, and a lot of us, in March of 2000. As for me, I was working the DotCom Boom in the SF Bay Area at the time. I say that generally because I was a consultant that went into a number of different companies. (Large F500 types alongside the typical silicon valley startups you likely associate with that time and place) I was a hired gun that went in when $#!7 hit the fan on people’s Microsoft servers and networks, as it often did when your company threw itself together on a concept and little more.

Now, the previous 5+ years were the real bulk of that boom. The growth there in the late 90s was enormous. There was more money flowing around than people knew what to do with. A lucky few of my friends and coworkers managed to cash out an early IPO before things went south. Most of us, however, were just “paper millionaires,” locked into vesting periods on options that were going to make us rich in just the next 5 years or so.

Something many people don’t appreciate was that a lot of that boom was built on the Y2K crisis. People like to point at the DotComs (Pets.Com anyone) and all the startup activity, but the real money was in the big legacy corps modernizing all their systems. Tons of old code got touched for the first time in 20-30 years. All that work basically funded the afterhours ventures of countless digital dreamers on both sides of the Bay and well into the Valley.

So the first surprise <sarcasm> absolutely no one saw coming </sarcasm> was the first waves of crashing at the end of Q1 2000. That was when all the big boys’ clubs reported their first quarter post Y2K. It set the finance world at ease that nothing was crashing down, and let all of them say in unison,” Well we don’t need to pay all these programers anymore.” Slow motion stock crashes followed, starting with the supporting companies, tech infrastructure manufacturers, and then the startups. Those paper millions turned to paper confetti.

By November of 2000 the country was in a full blown recession, and people quickly forgot the 8 years of prosperity that came before. Instead of voting for more of the same, for budget surpluses, free trade, and global leadership, we voted for a Texan good ol boy with name recognition and being best known for a baseball team and former cocaine addiction—someone who promised to get the country back to focus on itself rather than global post-cold-war interests abroad.

Full disclosure, living in California at the time, there was zero chance my state or district was going for anyone other than Al Gore, so 2000 was the first and only time I ever sent my vote to a protest candidate. As a full-of-myself 20 something, living in Berkeley, I had a lot of hopes and dreams of a better future that much of this country didn’t and still doesn’t share.

This was my 9/11. What came after was inevitable…

That brings me to 2001. What a lot of memorials leave out of the story was the time from January 20 to September 10, 2001. The stories coming from the Whitehouse at the time would be unfortunate echoes of today. People forget the headline a few months before 9/11 where Mr. W was criticized for ignoring the security briefings and fulfilling his promise to pull back support for US intelligence and operations overseas. This was a president who saw the USS Cole incident only months before as a sign that we should do less. Here was Osama bin Laden executing a complex, extensively planned, bombing against a US military target, killing hundreds of US citizens—a group that was among Bill Clinton’s first warnings to his successor.

So when people memorialize 9/11 as being a wake up call to America. When they say that they were in shock when they watched the second plane hit the towers. I sigh in frustration, because I and a lot of other people not only saw it coming, we saw it as inevitable.

There was a cartoon, airing on MTV in the 90s. A story of teenage angst called Daria, and one episode immediately came to mind after 9/11/2001. Being someone who thinks about the big picture, who saw just how inevitable it was that the USA would get attacked, who still mourned, like everyone else, just a bit differently—I often heard the words “it makes you think.”

This video breaks it down. “The Misery Chick” aka “It really makes you think.”

So yeah, I guess I’m the misery chick of 9/11. That’s why I’ve kept my mouth shut about it for 25 years.

But another thing happened right after 9/11 that my big picture thinking and love of 90s media saw coming.

In Babylon 5 there was a reflection about the Earth Minbari War. It went something like this:

“Among Minbari, one individual leads, but we move as one. We are at our best when we move together, and we are at our worst when we move together.

When our leader was killed by your people, we went mad together. We stayed mad for a very long time, a madness that almost consumed your world, until finally, before it was too late, we woke up together.” —Delenn

This was a deep cut. After some searching, I found the full quote. It appears to be from Season 3 Episode 11 “Ceremonies of Light and Dark“

Of all the memorial tributes going on the airwaves today, only one brought me to tears. It was a replay of President George W Bush at ground zero—a “touching, unifying, moment” by the radio commentator’s account—but I heard something different 25 years later:

That chant of “USA, USA, USA” doesn’t sound like unity to me. It only sounds like a people going mad together. And like the Minbari, we didn’t stop with the ones who attacked us. Seeing fear in my Muslim friends’ eyes, and hearing their stories, still, years later, still leaves me with the shadow of the shame of that madness. For 20 years, on so many battle fronts, the madness pushed on.

That’s it. That’s my memory and memorial of 9/11. Not the usual “I remember exactly where I was when the planes hit” moment (I was on a train, headed to the South Bay, stopped for 2 hours as all transit traffic was, looking at an empty cloudless sky outside of Fremont, CA). Sure, I remember it. I also remember the day before, when my nephew was born and sent to the NICU, not knowing whether he’d live to see the next day. Burned into my memory even more than the second plane flying into the tower is my brother in-law’s voice giving me that news. I remember the world already being upside down before those planes ever hit.

I remember it as a moment in a long line of moments before and after, moments that can’t be taken alone.