We’ve Lost the 9/11 Feeling

RUSH: People have been asking me yesterday and last night: ‘What are you going to do on 9/11?’ I remember back on that day, I was flying to Omaha for a golf tournament, turned out to be the last charity golf tournament that Warren Buffett put on. I left here, South Florida, about eight a.m., I believe, something like that, and we got a phone call aboard the plane around 9:30, 9:45 saying, ‘You gotta turn around. You gotta get back. You’ve got 90 minutes to get where you’re going and if you don’t get there, put down in 90 minutes.’ Air traffic control was clearing the skies. And I said, ‘What happened?’ ‘The World Trade Center’s been hit.’ ‘You’re kidding.’ But we had no pictures up there at the time, didn’t have DirecTV on the plane. This is why, by the way, I broke down and decided to put DirecTV on the plane. Sorry for the self-absorption, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a personal story, however it’s relevant to events of the day.

So we landed at some out of the way place near Orlando, rented a car, flight attendant Jody drove me back here to the hangar where my car was. It wasn’t ’til two o’clock that I saw pictures of what had happened, and I, you know, was just stunned. I remember I got here behind the Golden EIB Microphone maybe for a half hour, 45 minutes. The next day, on September 12th, after having a night to think about it, one of the things that I concluded was that the worst thing we could do would be to shut down the country every 9/11, because that’s what they tried to do. I remember saying to you on this program, ‘What were those almost 3,000 people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon doing at that time, that morning? They were going to work.’ I think we can get too self-absorbed, if you’ll pardon the use of the term, with constant memorials that shut down everything. Go ahead and memorialize it as we are, but don’t stop going to work; don’t stop making the country work; don’t let this every year shut down the United States of America. That’s what keeps America working is Americans working, and that’s what we all need to keep doing.

But here’s what I do want to ask you to do today, and this is something you can do yourself. We don’t need to spend a whole lot of time here on the radio reliving it in order for you be able to accomplish this. I want you to take, especially with what is happening in the country today and around the world, the threats that we are faced with, take just a few seconds and recall how you felt on that day when you first saw pictures or when you first heard what had happened. We usually don’t want to dwell on feelings. We like to deal in thoughts here at the EIB Network. But this is an exception. Because I think we’ve lost the feeling, and naturally so. These are not the kind of feelings you want to revisit. They’re not the kind of feelings you want to stew in. I think you should, though. I think you should take the time whenever you have time today, just think back to how you felt. I don’t care what the feeling was: shock, sorrow, disbelief, rage, anger, desire for immediate reciprocity. Because I think the whole country needs to be yanked back into the memorial of how we all felt that day, how scared, how helpless, how stunned and how shocked and how sad and how mad everyone was as the event unfolded right before our eyes. This is one bad memory be that we need to keep as a bad memory and never forget it, if we are to deal with these people who perpetrated this act effectively in the future.