Author: Jason

9/11 At Twenty

It was about this time 20 years ago that I returned to the office with a co-worker to hear the South Tower had collapsed.

The office was less than 3 blocks from the White House where we’d headed out of morbid curiosity about thirty minutes before, arriving to Lafayette Park in time to see officers yelling for everyone to get back, they were clearing up to two blocks around the White House.

15 minutes prior, Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Otherwise it was aiming for DC, the Capitol or the White House, for about during that time, that window when dumb me had to rubberneck because sitting there watching the TV felt helpless.

Last year was the first time I got all of my 9/11 day-of thoughts down in one place. 19 years after the fact. Not sure why it took that long.

And of course there are parts missing, either forgotten or purposefully omitted or dismissed because so many others were really *THERE* and who am I to memorialize something I just happened to be in the vicinity of.

But, ultimately, to a certain extent, everyone was *THERE* in some way or another. Either there at the Towers or Pentagon or in New York or DC/NOVA or knew someone who was or watched and thought “what if that were me?” and to varying degrees and emotions felt it.

It’s insane that it’s been 20 years already. To remember there was a time before and what that was like.

Remember, folks. Remember those who were lost. Remember those who survived. The families, the heroes. Remember the lessons. Remember that few don’t define the many. And remember that when some are at their worst there are so many of us who will be at their very best.

Be safe, y’all.

On Curating and Editing

I posted a thread on Twitter and then thought, heck, that’s a blog post!

As I continue to cull through old J’s Notes posts to reshare on the current site I run into the moral quandary of not just choosing what I don’t want to reshare, but how much I should edit what I do reshare.

For the first, sure, it’s kinda dishonest for me to hide some of the things I proudly shared in the last 20 years but I’ve grown, become better informed, a better writer (in some areas), and generally don’t necessarily have the same tastes as I did in my mid-20s.

For the second, I’m torn on how much I should “clean up” past content or just let is live as a historical document of, wow, I really messed up my grammar or used “pisses me off” a lot as a youngin’.

If I do edit, do I owe the potential reader any notation on what may have been edited? Does degree of editing matter? Am I overthinking it?

This is ultimately for me, I don’t think anyone out there is going to wonder what I thought about random links I found interesting in June of 2003 other than me, and I’ll always have the archive to embarrass myself with.

Also, anything I don’t include is probably available to anyone with a medium degree of internet sleuthing because nothing on the internet is private and everything is forever to a degree so I’m not protecting myself from future dirt digging (if needed).

This is also a hidden process, I could do nothing and no one would know, but the whole point of blogging for 20 years has been a certain degree of oversharing.

So it’s really about what do I want to continue to embrace and have my name attached to.

I don’t really owe anyone anything when it comes to my website’s content, but as someone with a general interest in history I think about what I would want to see if I dug into something like this.

Aritha van Herk had an good, thought provoking response:

And I’m ultimately torn on this – I like seeing history evolve and show that change, but we also live in an era where we give very little room for someone to grow as a person over the course of a lifetime, let alone a decade or so.

Curating is one thing, all history is curated, we don’t have a record of every moment of every thing, but editing is a different beast.

If history is edited, is it really history?

I’m not editing to hide anything, really, but even curating at this point is really editing an already existing historical record.

Chris O’Donnell, with one of the few active blogs I can think of that pre-date J’s Notes, added:

And the changed beliefs is the big thing, but does killing it off look like whitewashing?

I’m also probably being waaaaaay too generous to myself to think that I’ll ever be of any import that my past thoughts are going to matter one way or another.

On Afghanistan

In light of what’s happening in Afghanistan, I may have made this statement 12 years ago in reference to health care but it still stands.

If the government is going to get into the business of doing something – health care, utilities, etc. – then it has a moral obligation to do it right.

We can make all of the arguments in the world about why and whether we should have been there, but once we were there, we – and ALL of those involved (allies) – owed it to the people of Afghanistan to do it right. We clearly failed.

Already there are those who served alongside America who are suffering and dying for fighting for something even the Afghani government didn’t believe in.

And the Taliban’s historical treatment of women and ethnic and religious minorities hasn’t changed in twenty years so the tragedy there is only going to grow.

Of course, it’s easy to sit and rant on Twitter compared to those who have had to figure out an optimal solution over the last 20 years. It’s just hard to believe that the best outcome was what we’re seeing now.