A year ago I posted "Some Seven Years Later" on this blog:
September 11th is always an interesting day for me. Back in 2001, during those events, my wife was in the air on a small plane destined for Washington Reagan airport. Once I became aware of the situation, I had no means to determine where she was or her status. I left work and told my co-workers I would be going to D.C. to try and bring her back as that was my only option. While on the way home, I received a call that confirmed her plane had landed at Reagan. Once at home, I got a call from my wife, that was transferred to me from work, and she let me know she was okay. She said she had seen the smoke at the Pentagon as they landed, but thought it was just a fire and was unaware of any of the events involving the hijacked planes. For her sake, that was probably better than knowing while still in the air. Those events, in that short period of time, have done more to shape my life from that point on than any one event I can remember. For several years, I devoted myself as board member of my local Infragard chapter, I started taking life one day at a time and thought we, as a nation, could effect change to prevent something like this from happening again in the future.
Some seven years later, I am rethinking our ability to effect change. Being a government servant myself, I see the bureaucratic hurdles and have noted how DHS is on their third iteration of let’s try it this way and see if it works any better. In my own state, our homeland security responsibilities, while part of a cabinet level agency, are tucked away as a little branch of Emergency Management. I guess that means there has to be an emergency before we think about homeland security. I believe homeland security needs to be more autonomous and provide the direction for emergency management not the other way round. For me, the underlying question is, in a society where the freedoms and rights of citizens are paramount, how can you legislate and enforce security without infringing on individual rights? I work in information security and know it has to be blend of limiting exposure and risk while still allowing the application or employee to work without undue hindrance, but when you try to apply that to physical security aimed at preventing terrorism you may as well be prepared for a public backlash that will ultimately tie the hands of the agencies tasked with our protection. I don’t have the answer and sadly believe it will take another foreign terrorist incident on U.S. soil to effect serious change in this country.
Since about a year after 9/11 I have had a "Remember 9/11" sticker on the back of my car. Today I will scrape that sticker, like the one below, off my car. I have mixed feelings about it, but after recently posting my 9/11 story on the Blackboard site for my fellow students in the Community Preparedness and Disaster Management course I am taking at UNC I think it’s time. In the first few weeks of this course, I quickly learned too much about the underlying government bureaucracy that we depend on for disaster management. Plan all we can, there is no means to adequately test disaster response at any level close to what will be seen in reality. That said, now is the time to make sure you and your family have established plans and means to carry them out in the event of a disaster. While government help may eventually come, it will be days before you can count on it.
