By Galicant Wiseword - September 11, 2021

I remember the day I first realized that 9/11 would eventually be forgotten as vividly as I remember the morning of 9/11/2001. I was teaching a Sunday School class, 5th and 6th graders on a Sunday morning a few years after. I, a much younger man at the time, decided to spend the whole hour talking to this small class of boys and girls about the attacks, intending to field questions and address feelings after. After telling the story for about 20 minutes I looked into the vacant eyes of the future. They knew about the details, but they had not experienced the day. For them it was, and will always be, a memory based on someone else’s experience.

I myself was a child in my present eyes when the planes hit the buildings, but every bit an adult in my early 20’s. I was married with children, one just learning to walk and one still safe in my young wife’s womb. I can close my eyes and transport myself to our house on Fort Leavenworth, to being woken up just minutes after falling asleep after a night shift with the words “we’re being attacked” coming from my worried bride only seconds before being ordered on the phone to put my uniform on and stand by.

I didn’t have to ask which uniform. I watched with the rest of the world and the programming began. As a young soldier, husband, son and father I experienced 9/11 from a stateside military post.

Everyone that was old enough to experience the day remembers it just as vividly. Maybe, like myself, you spent the better part of the morning glued to the television, anxiously wondering what was happening, being exposed to the same video loops of the carnage over and over. Maybe wondering if it was going to stop or if a plane would be falling from the sky towards your business or neighborhood. Maybe you strained your ears at the sky, perhaps you remember glancing up nervously at least once.

If you were a believer, a follower of the King, you prayed. You probably prayed for George Bush Jr. I did. I was even a part of some online “pray for the president” group that had sprung up on an internet most people wouldn’t recognize today. He was not just my Commander in Chief at the time, but someone I thought was a “real” Christian back then.

You can ask anybody who experienced 9/11/01 where they were and they can spend a half-hour telling you about every detail. Nobody born in the last 25 years has experienced 9/11 and those of us who have are inevitably thinning out as the timeline marches on. I was thinking about this last night and about the people who experienced the assassination of John F Kennedy.

It seems obvious to most people today that Oswald was a patsy and that the former president was killed as the result of a complex conspiracy. Here nearly 70 years later we still don’t have definitive answers and the pool of people old enough to relay their experience thins day by day. Most of my elders that I’ve asked about it have the same experience we had with 9/11. It was a powerfully emotional event that we saw or heard on a form of media.

Vastly different from the people who experienced it as eye witnesses. I just wondered, just now as I’m writing this, if anyone in Dealy plaza on that day is still around. Could they offer anything we haven’t threshed out already? Unlikely. The people I’ve talked to that did experience that day, they all have told me that they fully believed the official story, usually for decades before questioning the reality of the event. Intense emotions make us susceptible to accepting new information without critical thought.

I experienced this phenomenon myself in boot camp, back when it was still the way you probably imagine it from movies or from your own pre-9/11 boot camp experience. While I wouldn’t make the connection until I finally read about Viktor Frankl’s experiences, boot camps back then were carefully designed to elicit intense emotions using techniques borrowed directly from the Nazi concentration camps. We even arrived in a cattle car. The U.S. government is well aware of how to manipulate the masses.

The 9/11 coverage we were all bombarded with for months was carefully crafted to elicit intense emotions. While our brains were still reeling, the television told us what was important to remember and provided a narrative that has persisted for two decades. As our fear and anger became the directors of our logical thinking apparatus, we were sold a “war on terror” and an immortal “patriot act” that would haunt us for the next 20 years and beyond.

I’m ashamed to admit I bought into all of it. I was still praying fervently for Boy George and saying things like “If we don’t fight them over there, they’ll do it again!”. Despite my growing family I was eager to be deployed to a desert in a far away place to fight the people the television told me to hate. I was angry when my unit was refused the “honor” being deemed mission critical elsewhere. God was watching out for this fool.

Oddly it was a flicker of a memory from my high school days that changed everything for me.

What I’m about to tell you very publicly, I’ve kept close to the vest for most of my life. I was starting to publicly talk about it 3 or 4 years ago when a friend who was with me that day was killed. That shut me up until now. This is my personal experience with 9/11 that woke me up, and proves to me without a doubt that the entire event was carefully planned by our own government. It is now only shared by 4 other people to my knowledge. It’s entirely unprovable except for our eyewitness experience, and even then what would that ever do to bring light to the dark lie we all bought into? The story we were told while being emotionally bombarded with terrible images of people jumping from burning skyscrapers?

A few years before basic training and 9/11/01 I was invited to experience something. One of my best friends wanted to be a pilot (a dream he since achieved) and he was invited by a man at our church to use a professional flight simulator. He invited me and a handful of our classmates along, all young men in their senior or junior year of high school. The man from our church was a polished former Air Force fighter pilot and generally respected among the congregation.

I remember seeing his helmet at his house during a few of our youth group meetings. So one night, (I remember it being dark when we arrived) we got into the church van and he drove us to Stapleton airport in Denver. This was when DIA opened and Stapleton was “closed”. We went into a empty dark building and loaded up into a geodesic simulator on actuators with all the bells and whistles. We spent at least a few hours taking turns on the simulator, which precisely mimicked the cockpit and flight capabilities of a 757 type passenger plane. We each performed several take-offs and landings and learned all the basics.

Maybe I only remember because I was in the captain’s seat near the end when things took a turn. It was something I remembered as fun or challenging, like “let’s just have some fun before you guys head out”; just a little monkey wrench tossed in to see how we’d do in different emergency flight situations. I literally forgot about it, even after 9/11 for a few years. I was sitting in the front left seat and the screen switched to us over to a city in inclement weather. The twin towers were about 1 minute in front of me.

“Don’t hit the buildings”.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, but that’s as close as I can offer. I remember trying to pull out of the dive I was suddenly put in from a simulated wind shear. I remember the yoke being stiff and unresponsive under my grip. I hit the buildings, I remember being disappointed, the simple feeling of losing nothing more important than a video game. Each of us repeated this scenario only once.

I think my pilot friend might have been the only one to manage to steer clear, one of us did anyway, the rest rammed into the twin towers one after another. We laughed and joked as we got back into the van and headed home. The memory got tucked away in my brain and then covered with layers of memories and finally tossed in a dark long-term memory file cabinet somewhere in the back.

Several years later, long after teaching the kids in Sunday School and having another kid of my own, something walked to the back of my brain and dusted off a file cabinet, pulled that memory and marched it to the front and center of my concentration. It got stuck there, like a post-it note on a computer screen. I couldn’t not see it anymore. I started looking at 9/11 with logic instead of sadness or anger or fear. I reviewed the events, long removed from the TV on a new website called “YouTube”.

I watched the planes smash perfectly into the buildings and thought about how the flight simulator could almost land the plane remotely, how the yoke wouldn’t budge under my control. I, like many others, eventually woke up to the fact that the official story about 9/11 belonged in the fiction section. The more I used critical thinking to examine the attacks, the more I came to realize it was all planned, and not by some third-world goat herders.

This is what divides our country to this day. What you believe about the events that transpired that day has altered your perception of everything that has happened in the 20 years since. People that accepted the “official” story about 9/11 are largely the same people that approve of the government forcing their neighbors to take an experimental gene-therapy jab. They still operate out of fear or anger. We’ve all incrementally allowed unforgivable trespasses on our freedom and dignity and it’s finally coming to a head.

Now, twenty years later, our country is teetering on the precipice of civil war, or revolutionary war depending on your perspective. We cannot be further divided it seems. This is the part in most of these articles where I get frustrated because it was several paragraphs of information I already knew and no answers, no thoughts on the future. Perhaps its because the answer now is the same as it was on 9/12/01.

We don’t want to say it out loud. It’s the kind of thing discussed in dark bars and between trusted friends after church (the places they purposely closed down last year). It’s the kind of talk that gets men disappeared in nations with tyrannical dictators that are “losing their patience” with certain marginalized groups of people. It’s the kind of talk going on in Australia and France and across the world. There will have to be violence or surrender.

Mass civil disobedience is my preferred path. We’ll see between now and Halloween what that looks like after the puppet Joseph Stal…Biden’s speech yesterday. There will be some small protests, they will not be the kind of mass protests we’ve seen in countries that don’t own most of the worlds firearms. Pathetically the protests will be polite and confined to “free-speech zones” and fenced off safe-spaces. You will not witness the revolution, it will not be televised. Americans are fat and happy and have too much to lose.

They’ll stay home and try to watch others fix their country on television until they hear that fateful knock on their own door. The Republican party will not save you. Donald Trump will not save you. If you haven’t been prepping, even working towards becoming self-sufficient for the past years you’re effectively out of time . . .

[SNIP]