{"id":14817,"date":"2015-09-11T12:31:57","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T17:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=14817"},"modified":"2015-09-11T12:46:31","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T17:46:31","slug":"9-11-fourteen-years-ago-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=14817","title":{"rendered":"9-11 &#8211; Fourteen years ago today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote a <a href=\"My first year after 9\/11\">short post<\/a> on the tenth anniversary of 9\/11. In reading it just now I did something I seldom do. I made a couple of corrections. I changed &#8220;undo&#8221; to &#8220;undue&#8221; the correct spelling. I also changed one &#8220;the to a &#8220;that.&#8221;  It would take me a full year of ten-day slogs to edit the whole blog going back nine years.<\/p>\n<p>I was trying to see if I could find any mention of what I was doing on the day itself not the tenth anniversary. I&#8217;m at the airport now and asked our driver why the flags were at half mast. Of course, I was embarrassed to have been so clueless. I&#8217;m surprised I didn&#8217;t see the day noted in the PB Post.<\/p>\n<p>I was preoccupied on 9\/11 too. I heard a report in passing on an airplane crashing into the Twin Towers but didn&#8217;t catch that it was ominous. I imagined it was a piper cub or at worst like the crash that left a plane sticking out of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/B-25_Empire_State_Building_crash\">Empire State Building<\/a> back in the 1950&#8217;s in other words &#8220;tragic&#8221; not &#8220;TRAGIC!!!!!!&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>I was hurrying out of the house to drop something off at the Superintendent&#8217;s office. When I got there everyone was listening to the news and in a state of alarm. I recall beginning to blow it off only be told it seemed very serious. I headed for home listening to NPR on my short drive to 21st Avenue. Upon my return I immediately turned on the television in our kitchen and saw the pictures of the smoking World Trade Towers. I saw one tower crumble and then the next. I imagined thousands, tens of thousands, dying before my eyes. <\/p>\n<p>A few days later I made an appointment to speak to the one board member I had near poisonous relations with and told her that I was too devastated to work on passing a levy referendum for more money to fund our schools. She begged me to find the strength and in time I did. 2001 was an election year. I was so determined I went to one Board meeting and, when I heard opposition to our even offering the referendum, I gave an impassioned speech explaining how necessary I felt a levy was and then ended with a fist pounding down on the dais and a &#8220;God Dammit.&#8221; This was the &#8220;obscenity-lace diatribe&#8221; that columnist Ralph Doty said I was guilty of in <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1129\">his column<\/a> damning me three days before the 2007 election which I lost to Judy Seliga-Punyko. You can watch <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=F5ON7tk126A\">the speech here<\/a>. I&#8217;ve always been proud of it. Or watch it <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=575\">here<\/a> on my blog.<\/p>\n<p>Judy has chided me for cutting the seven period day at this time. I had little choice. The referendum failed. Ironically, Judy voted against it telling me that she couldn&#8217;t vote for it since our School Board had not had the courage to close Central High School. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote a short post on the tenth anniversary of 9\/11. In reading it just now I did something I seldom do. I made&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14817"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14817"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14832,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14817\/revisions\/14832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}