The Skies Are Not So Friendly

Not long ago, I told you a story about my peeves related to riding on Amtrak. Foolish me! The project I've been working on for the past year, which had me making regular trips on Amtrak from the Boston area down to NYC, has ended, and I now find myself having to fly to my new assignments with clients located in Denver and Dallas. I had forgotten what a dream of convenience the train is when compared to air travel.

I love to fly, and I hate to fly. I've been flying since I was a small child, back in the days when all passenger jets still had propellers rather than jet engines; thinking about it makes me feel old. Every summer we'd go to visit my parents' respective sides of the family in (of all places) Denver and Dallas, and I'd sit at my window seat waiting for the ritual of the engines starting up one by one, signalling that we'd be in the air shortly. Today I still try to get a window seat on every flight because I just enjoy looking down at the landscape, even if I end up trapped, just me and my bladder, contemplating how long I'm going to wait before shaking the passengers in the middle and aisle seats awake and entreating them to stand up so that I can make my way to the restroom.

Those Were The Days

When I'd go on those family trips as a small child, a big fuss was always made about my brother and sister and I being appropriately dressed up, because that's just what you did in those days, before deregulation came in and made flying affordable for the unwashed masses. I remember when I was old enough to fly by myself how odd it felt to just turn up at the airport in my standard uniform of jeans and sneakers and flannel shirt.

Traveling In Style

But then came the eighties and deregulation and the beginning of the slow downward spiral in comfort and convenience, accelerated by acts of terrorism and culminating in the 9/11 events that have made just getting to the gate a miserable and tedious process. The pleasure of the flying itself remains; it's the whole process around it that leaves me in a state of dread at the thought of having to fly somewhere. Now that it looks like I'm entering another phase of regular air travel, I'm going to have to get used to it.

My flight home from Dallas last night brought this all into stark relief. I had a reservation on US Airways to fly to Boston via Philadelphia. The security procedure at DFW wasn't too bad, and I got to my gate with time to spare for my 5:45 PM flight. Normally you board about a half hour before departure time, but when we reached that point I saw no moves on the part of the gate agent to start the long and convoluted process in which they board different categories of passengers, starting with the ones who have achieved Double Platinum Sapphire Exalted Emperor status and finishing with me, the one guy who has been relegated to the dreaded Zone 5. 

The gate agent did announce that the flight was oversold, and anyone who would voluntarily give up his seat could get a voucher worth $600 to be booked onto a flight the following morning. I always contemplate whether I should take the airline up on one of these offers, although it would have to include arrangements to feed, house and transport me at their expense. But invariably it's more important to me to just get home, plus I'm not sure if the travel voucher would come with all kinds of restrictions and end up being more of a hassle than anything else.

Eventually the gate agent opened the door, which usually signals that we will now start boarding, but instead of propping it open he disappeared down the jetway, closing the door behind him. Five minutes ticked by, then ten, then fifteen and then eventually, about five minutes after our scheduled departure time, he reappeared. He stepped to the podium and announced that there was some mechanical issue that necessitated waiting until some part arrived and was installed, and it was uncertain how long that would take. Regardless of what the airline might tell us officially, his opinion was that people going to Philadelphia would almost certainly get there that night, but anyone with a connection was going to miss it and those of us in that category should line up at the podium to try to make alternative arrangements.

I dread these kinds of situations, having found myself in them a number of times. The airline plays a little game with you in which they periodically feed you a new revised boarding time and then as you just about reach that time, they give you another new (and later) boarding time. They never actually come out and say look, folks, it's just not gonna happen tonight; instead they string you along endlessly until it's way too late to make any kind of alternate arrangement. Indeed, shortly after the gate agent made his announcement, I got an automated call on my cell phone telling me that the flight was delayed by a half hour due to "congestion at the destination", which was of course entirely different from what the gate agent had just told us.

I dutifully got in line, but I also took out my phone and called US Airways customer service. I had looked up the number before I headed for the airport to have it just in case, seasoned traveler that I am. I got through to an agent who repeated the line about congestion at my destination; I told her that we got a completely different story from the gate agent. I expected her to tell me sorry, this is what's in the system (they always refer to "the system" like it's the source of ultimate truth), so just wait another half hour and then you'll be on your way. To my surprise she instead said she'll look for an alternate arrangement, but I'll have to wait on hold. So I stood there, phone in hand, wondering what I should do if I was still on hold when I got to the head of the line. As I got closer to the head of the line she came on a couple of times to tell me that arrangements were being made, please just be patient. Eventually I got to the head of the line and started letting people go past me.

Finally the phone agent told me I was now booked on a direct flight to Boston on American. There was some additional step that needed to be completed that was taking longer than expected (what exactly that step was I didn't really understand, since I speak English and not airline-ese), but I was booked on the American flight that was leaving in a little over an hour, so I should head over to the gate and see the agent there with the confirmation number I had just been given; whatever that final step was, it should be completed by the time I was at the American gate.

…And of course, it was not. The gate agent at American did that thing where they type a bunch of stuff into their computer terminal, then frown a lot, then tell you some totally arcane piece of information, and then type some more. Finally she told me I was indeed booked but not ticketed, as if the difference is common knowledge that any schoolboy would possess. She typed a lot more, then asked the other gate agents some questions involving more exotic airline terminology that meant nothing to me, then made a phone call. Finally she told me she was waiting for a call back; my problem was being taken care of so I should step into the waiting area until she called me back. Right… we've heard this one before.

I was kind of losing hope at this point; experience has taught me that where the airlines are concerned, even the simplest problem ends up being massively complicated to resolve and usually ends with an apology but no real solution. So I was deeply relieved when the phone rang, the agent answered it and then shortly afterward called me over and handed me a boarding pass a couple of minutes before we were to start boarding. 

I was thankful to be holding a boarding pass in my hands now. I wasn't so happy to see I'd be boarding at the very end, meaning there was a good chance that there'd be no room for my small suitcase, and I might have to check it and then wait another half hour to collect it from the notoriously slow baggage claim in Boston, but beggars can't be choosers. But to my great surprise, the gate agent called me over while the priority passengers were just starting to board and said, "this other guy thinks he has your seat, so I want you to board right now." I was more than happy to oblige her.

I took my seat but had to wonder whether they would shortly come to get me, saying sorry, but this is actually the other guy's seat, you'll have to get back off. As I sat there I noticed that there were a couple of other cases of two or even three people being booked in the same seat, which the flight attendants (When did we actually start calling them that? When did they stop being stewardesses?) were trying to sort out. I could not have been happier when they finally closed the doors and told everyone to take their seats.

What Exactly Do You Mean By "Flight Attendant"?

So all in all, my flight home was a stressful experience, as so often in the past, but it could have been far worse; I could have found myself stuck overnight in Dallas or Philadelphia, for example. All of the people I dealt with were surprisingly helpful; I'm used to just getting the company line from some customer service agent who is tired of having dealt with other people's problems all day and is now having a hard time finding the enthusiasm to deal with mine. I wonder if all of the bad press the airlines have gotten over the past decade or so for their terrible customer service is finally having an effect. I guess I'll have another chance to find out when I go to see my Denver client next week.

The Road to Damascus

I was reading about Republican senator Rob Portman's about-face on the gay marriage issue tonight. The gist of it is that he was strongly against gay marriage, then he found out his own son was gay, now he decided it's a good idea after all. DOMA is wrong, says the suddenly enlightened senator.

I'm reminded of the story of the conversion of Paul the Apostle. According to the New Testament, Paul, who began his life as Saul of Tarsus, was an ardent persecutor of early Christians. Traveling to Damascus, he had a vision of the resurrected Jesus and subsequently became an equally ardent Christian. In Portman's case there was no vision of supernatural beings, just a vision of his own son revealing to him who he really is. 

Funny how it's easy to rail against something when it's just an abstract concept that has no direct connection to your own life, but one fine day when it unexpectedly affects you or someone close to you, the world suddenly looks a lot different. Said Portman: "It allowed me to think about this issue from a new perspective and that’s as a dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister have."

I'll give the good Senator credit for seeing the error of his ways and admitting that publicly, but there's still a kind of bitter aftertaste of hypocrisy that I can't quite get out of my mouth. Portman has called for the repeal of "Obamacare"; would he rethink that position if his son couldn't get health insurance because of some pre-existing condition? Portman has voted against a number of measures related to gun control; would he feel differently if his son had been among the victims in Aurora or Newtown when some unbalanced guy with a military-grade weapon showed up and began blasting away?

It's easy to think that all illegal immigrants are here to live off welfare and food stamps when you've never actually met one. It's easy to think that the minimum wage is a bunch of liberal nonsense when you've never spent time with somebody who is trying to scrape by on $7.25 an hour. It's easy to think that 47% of Americans are lazy do-nothings whose only purpose in life is to live off other people's taxes when you are most at home among people who can afford to attend your $50,000-a-plate fundraiser. I wonder what the Republican party would look like if its members would just get out a little more.

Aw, c'mon guys! You didn't think I really meant it when I voted for DOMA, did you?

Creative Writing Exercise

One of my favorite childhood memories is of how my father used to take the family to the Balloon Park once in a while. We would all pile into the old donkey cart and off we'd go.

The Balloon Park was the place you went in those days if you really liked balloons. If you had a balloon of your own you would take it along to show off, especially if it was a really nice one. If you didn't have a balloon of your own to take along, it was still really fun to go and admire the balloons that other people had brought.

Better Times

You could also rent a balloon if you wanted to. There was a guy named Old Jake who ran a balloon rental stand, where you could rent a balloon by the hour. Old Jake wasn't really old, and his name wasn't even Jake, it was Herman Joseph; he just liked everyone to call him "Old Jake". He was kind of short and skinny, but we all had respect for Old Jake, because it was common knowledge that he had done hard time, once for impersonating a fire hydrant and another time for multiple counts of hair fraud. He had a tattoo from prison too, one of those homemade jobs that looked from one angle like a steam locomotive and from a different angle like a straw basket full of fluffy kittens.

Old Jake didn't charge that much for his rental balloons, but he did expect you to treat them as if they were your own—keep them away from sharp objects and never insult or humiliate them. To make sure that you took proper care of them, you had to leave a deposit, or "hostage", as he called it, which was usually my little brother Sam. I always sort of wondered what would happen to Sam if I brought the balloon back damaged in some way, or went over the mileage limit, but I didn't really care that much, because I liked balloons more than Sam anyway. But since Mom and Dad brought us up to respect and honor balloons whatever the circumstances, it was pretty unlikely that we ever would have even had a chance to find out.

The Balloon Park didn't actually start out as a balloon park. It was originally just another city park, with the usual trees and benches and porcelain and meat. Then some guys started hanging out there with their balloons, and  more and more balloon enthusiasts started showing up, and then the next thing you know there's a big fancy sign put up by the city and the mayor showing up in an antique fire engine to show everyone what a regular guy he is, and one day you wake up to find out that the Balloon Park is now an officially sanctioned, taxpayer-supported city recreation facility.

In its heyday the Balloon Park attracted balloon lovers from all over the country and even overseas. It was one of the nicest facilities in America dedicated to the enjoyment of balloons and balloon culture. Occasionally you might even run into a celebrity, like that guy who was in that commercial for some stuff. It made me proud to know that this was all happening in my own hometown.

I don't recall exactly when it was, but the trouble started the time some people showed up with a kite. I can't possibly imagine what they were thinking, but there they were, all the same. They took that thing out, and one of them held it up facing the wind while another one held the string taught, and up it went. They really should have known better. People stood and stared in disbelief. I was still kind of young and naive back then, so at first I didn't really understand what was going on, but then I remembered how my father had once explained to me about how kites cause halitosis and divorce and despair, and I started to feel a little scandalized too. It wasn't long before the police came and put a stop to it, but the damage was done. We had lost our way, and there was no mistaking it. 

From there it was just a slow downward spiral. There was a brief craze for balloon animals, but it made a lot of people really uncomfortable. Some people thought it was the kind of innovation that promised to revive interest in the Balloon Park. But a lot of people thought it was just abuse. Dad said, "If they'd do that to a balloon, where does it stop? Are they going to start twisting up their own kids like that and call it art?" Most of us felt confused and weren't sure where we really stood on the question. It was all so perplexing.

Balloon Animal Cruelty

Later some guys started showing up with those new mylar balloons, and that's when people started feeling like they really had to choose sides. Most of us felt that if it's not natural latex, it's not a proper balloon (although I will confess that I too briefly felt the lure of the forbidden), but there was a pretty vocal minority that said this is the future of balloons, so get used to it. Fights broke out periodically and the cops were coming all the time, and Dad said it really wasn't safe to go down there anymore. When the guys with the puppets and the tubas started hanging out in one corner of the park, nobody even did anything about it. It was like people were beyond caring at that point. I think I was the only one in the family who was still even interested by then, since the rest of the family had discovered that they preferred spending their leisure time taking turns sitting on a damp washcloth.

A Crime Against Nature

Today all that stuff is gone. After the big balloon manufacturers pulled their sponsorships, the mayor said the city really couldn't afford to maintain it as a Balloon Park any more. Now that plot of land is just another ToadMart, like the ones you can see in practically any other town in America. It's too bad, but I guess that's progress. Still, I can't help but feel a little touch of teary-eyed nostalgia whenever I come across one of those old reruns of "Balloons, Ho!" while I'm aimlessly channel-surfing late on a Friday night.

On The Right Track

I'm sitting on a train home from New York City. To be more precise, I'm returning from Jersey City, NJ, via NYC. I have a client whose offices are in Jersey City, the part that is directly on the Hudson and is really just sort of an extension of Manhattan. I go down to spend a few days there every 2–3 weeks.

When I go to NYC I do my traveling on Amtrak. I could fly, but it's a gigantic hassle, costs more, and, measured by elapsed time door to door, doesn't actually get me there any faster. I instead take an Amtrak Acela train from the Boston area down to New York Penn Station, walk a block or so and then take the PATH train across (or I guess under) the Hudson to Jersey City.

I was sort of dreading this trip based on the experiences of the last trip I took a few weeks ago. I catch the Acela at the Route 128 station, which is the last station in the Boston area and pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It's a miserable place to get the train. In the winter the platform is cold and windy and wet; from spring to fall it's warm, but because they seem to have built the station in the middle of one of the swamps that are pretty common in my part of New England (oh, wait, I think we're supposed to call them "wetlands" nowadays) I spend most of my time on the platform swatting mosquitoes.

I leave my house around 40–45 minutes before my train is scheduled to go and drive to the station. I take an early morning train, so traffic isn't a problem, and there's usually plenty of parking, and I am in the station usually about ten to fifteen minutes before my train goes. Last time everything went as usual as far as getting to the station, but when I stepped into the station a little after 6 AM, around twice the usual number of people were crowded into the little suburban station's waiting room—not a good sign. Looking at the video display that lists all of the trains I saw that the train that was supposed to go an hour before mine was delayed, so these were obviously the passengers waiting for my train plus all the ones who were still waiting for the previous one. 

My train was listed as on time, though. Mulling this over, I decided there were two possibilities. Possibility one was that the delayed earlier train was going to show up after all, and my train would end up delayed by around an hour as well. Possibility two was that the earlier train would be cancelled, and everyone from that train would be trying to get on my train; not just at that station, but at the two preceding ones as well, so it was going to be really crowded. I decided that I should probably head out to the platform and hope my train would at least be on time.

As I was heading out the door, it was announced that the earlier train was cancelled, so we were now into possibility two territory. The whole mob followed me out to the platform. It was the first week of January; the thermometer showed 24º F as I left home, and as I stepped onto the platform it was probably no warmer. I had on my slacks and blazer, and my reasonably professional-looking overcoat, adequate clothing if I can keep moving over short distances in that kind of weather, but not really the recommended attire for just standing around waiting for a train that may or may not eventually be coming. Around fifteen minutes after the scheduled departure time of my train they announced that the earlier train, which was disabled, was offloading passengers at another stop onto my train. They of course said nothing about when my train would actually be arriving. Hooray for Amtrak!

This posed a bit of a dilemma. I could have gone into the station and waited there in warmth and comfort until they announced that my train was about to arrive. But I expected that whenever it did arrive, it was going to be pretty full, since it would contain all of the passengers from the disabled train as well as the ones who were booked on my train. That spot right at the front of the platform in the place where the door to the first car usually opens up (something I know from having taken that train literally a hundred or more times previously) was going to be valuable real estate that I would live to regret having relinquished; I would get on the train, but I might end up standing or sitting on the floor in an aisle for the three-and-a-half-hour trip to NYC. I stayed on the platform and hoped for the best.

Eventually my train did arrive—45 minutes late. I could no longer feel my feet by then, and I could feel the effects of hypothermia setting in; not the worst way to die, or so I have heard. But against all odds I survived long enough to board the Acela, and not a minute too soon, since I am kind of fond of those feet. It was crowded, but as one of the first passengers to board, I got a seat. I was thankful not to be one of the lost souls left wandering the aisles, hoping against all hope to eventually find a place to rest, the Flying Dutchmen of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor Acela service.

Amtrak's Acela service is kind of a curious thing. It was introduced with much fanfare in 2002. High-speed train service from Boston to Washington DC! Just like in Japan, or Europe! But the reality is different. In theory Acela can travel at speeds in excess of 150 mph. In practice, there are only two short stretches of track between Boston and Providence, RI where it actually does travel at that kind of speed. The rest of the way it just kind of putts along at the same slow speed as the regular Amtrak regional train, because the tracks aren't laid out for carrying anything moving faster than that. The convenience factor makes it the only profitable route in all of Amtrak, if I'm not mistaken (which I might be; believe anything you read here at your own peril), but it's not a real high-speed train. For my money it's not even as comfortable as the Amtrak regional trains, which I also ride occasionally.

An elaborate practical joke?

I have ridden real high-speed trains, so I know what we're missing here. Most recently, which was three or four years ago, I took the German Intercity Express (ICE) to Paris. For most of the trip it traveled at around 175 mph. I wish we could have something like that here, so I could be in NYC in two hours or so, but that would require infrastructure investment and a thing called "planning ahead", which we're unfortunately not so good at, and which I am told just leads to socialism anyway.

The impending arrival of the train in NY Penn Station is signaled by its entry into the Queens Tunnel, which, as the name implies, takes you from the borough of Queens under the East River directly into the heart of midtown Manhattan. You step off the train onto the narrow underground platform and then try to figure out where you are and where you need to go. As you walk along the platform you pass various stairways and escalators. If you've been there as many times as I have, you know where to go; if you haven't, you may be in for a longer journey than you were expecting. Between the crowd of people exiting the train and the various support columns, stairways, escalators and freight elevators the length of the platform, it's hard to see down the platform and there isn't much in the way of signage telling you which way you should go. You pick an exit and hope it's the one that will get you reasonably near to where you need to go. Eventually you end up in the main area of the station, one level below the street. If you're me, which I am, you exit via the escalator that disgorges you onto the corner of 7th Avenue and 32nd Street.

If you've never been there before, or even if you have, it's sort of jarring when you step off the escalator onto the street. You're right there in the middle of the concrete canyons of midtown, with throngs of people charging up and down the sidewalk with a look of determination in their eyes and the traffic, which seems to consist mainly of those iconic yellow taxis, featured in one of my earlier posts, whizzing down 7th Ave. If you arrive during the morning commute, as I normally do, you will enjoy the added treat of those guys who distribute the free commuter newspapers shouting and thrusting them at you as you walk by.

To get to my ultimate destination, I walk a block down 32nd St. to the 33rd St. PATH station (which may sound odd, but the station has entrances on 32nd St. as well), trundling my little black suitcase behind me, dodging the crowds of pedestrians and navigating as best I can around the panhandlers, street vendors and trucks offloading their morning deliveries. The PATH train takes me across the Hudson (or under it, actually) to Jersey City and the office in which my client is located. The whole trip generally takes about four and a half hours door to door.

Going home means reversing the aforementioned process, but leaving from NY Penn Station introduces another element of excitement and suspense. As I was alluding to earlier, NY Penn station contains multiple subterranean levels. The sheer size of the place is pretty amazing, although in the summertime parts of it can feel a lot like the bowels of hell; the platforms in particular get stiflingly hot then. Incidentally, in case you're wondering why I keep referring to it a NY Penn and not just Penn, it's because there is also a Penn Station in several other eastern seaboard cities in which the Pennsylvania Railroad originally operated.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Anyway, from the street level you descend about one story down to the main area of Penn Station. Coming down the stairs or the escalator from 7th Ave., you pass by the ticket and waiting area of the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) and various shops selling food and magazines and various (mostly) travel-related items to the main waiting area and the ticketing windows of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. In this area there's another set of stairs and escalators leading down to a second subterranean level. Here there are yet more shops, ticket vending machines and stairways leading down to the third level, which is where the tracks and boarding platforms actually are. There are 21 tracks in all, distributed in overlapping fashion among LIRR, Amtrak and NJ transit. In addition, from this second underground level you can get directly access the A, C and E subway lines at one end and the 1, 2 and 3 lines at the other. My description here doesn't really convey the size of the overall structure, but for my money it's pretty massive.

The suspense factor is, or so I am guessing, a function of the relatively limited amount of space down on the platforms. It's chaotic and crowded enough when I get off the train and try to get off the platform; if there were also dozens or hundreds of people also waiting on the platform trying to get on at the same time, it would be complete pandemonium. As a result, which track a given train is going to be leaving from is a closely-guarded secret that is only revealed around fifteen minutes before the train actually leaves. Now, normally NJ Transit uses tracks 1–16, Amtrak has 5–16 and LIRR is on 13–21. But to find out which track from within that range your train will be on, you need to wait until it's announced over the PA and posted on the video monitors in the second level and the big board on the first. There is usually a big throng of people gathered around the video monitors on the second level, which is where I also wait. As soon as a train is announced, there's a mad dash by a large part of the crowd to whichever track has just been communicated as the departure track for that train.

Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances

Apparently most Amtrak passengers board from the first underground level, where the Amtrak waiting areas and ticket windows are located. As soon as the track for their train is announced, they queue up in a long line at the head of a down escalator that descends at a maddeningly slow speed directly down to the third level where the platforms are, and the struggle to find a decent seat begins. It's bearable if you're traveling alone, but if there are two of you, unless you're the first ones down the escalator your chances of finding a seat together are not great.

I did this exactly once. The next time I traveled home from NY Penn I discovered the aforementioned second level and the stairs that lead down to the platforms, which gave me a jump on the bulk of the passengers who were still putt-putting down the escalator as I stepped onto the train. With time I came to know that they announce the track about five minutes after the train actually arrives, presumably to let passengers disembark before they let anyone else onto the track. I also observed that my train will usually arrive on one of the tracks from 7 to 12, mostly on 7 or 8, and only rarely on 5–6 or 13–14.

So now my way of gaming the system is to arrive 20 minutes before my train is scheduled to depart. I peer down the steps onto each of tracks 7–12 and make a mental note of which ones are empty and which have trains sitting on them. Then I listen for the ding, ding, ding of the warning bell of a train pulling up to a platform and check the tracks I noted as empty, looking for an Acela coming in, pointed in the direction that indicates it will be heading to Boston (because the train from NY Penn to Washington, DC also leaves and departs at the same time). Then I just bop on down the stairs and as soon as the exiting passengers are off, I'm on with a wide choice of seats. Occasionally I don't guess right as far as the likely track, or don't hear the train coming in, but at least I still have a bit of a head start on most of the other passengers.

Occasionally my family has come down during a school break to run around NYC and do touristy things while I'm down there on business, and then we've traveled back together. I am sure they think that Dear Father is a bit of an obsessive nut as I run back and forth between tracks, trying to anticipate where our train will come in, but as mentioned before, two or more people don't have great chances of finding a seat together, and as the group grows larger, the probability of sitting together decreases exponentially. I have watched too many families searching desperately for seats that are at least in the same car to want to do that with my own family, especially when my kids were smaller.

Of course, Amtrak will still occasionally find ways to mess up my perfect system. On my last trip home, I was sitting smugly in my seat as one of a half-dozen or so passengers in my car who were already on the train before the main crowd arrived. While I was getting comfortable a guy in an Amtrak uniform knocked kind of urgently on my window and motioned toward the other track. I couldn't figure out what he wanted; I guessed that he was trying to tell me that I shouldn't be on the train yet, but I ignored him. They can take my seat when they pry it from my cold, dead butt. But then there was an announcement that this train would not be traveling beyond NYC; everyone should get off and board the regional train that was waiting on the track on the other side of the platform. Arrgh. That other train was already crowded, but I got one of the few remaining seats. Because it was a regional train that makes a lot more stops than the Acela, it also took me an additional 45 minutes to get home.

Sitting in my own safe seat as one of the first passengers on, I get to observe the same peculiar behavior repeated over and over. The trains I travel home on are evening trains and they are always crowded. And yet I observe plenty of people who will wander up and down the car, passing one empty seat after another, even as the car is filling up, as if they think that the longer they look, the more likely they are to find the perfect seat.

I have my own peculiar habits as far as seat choice goes, honed over what is probably well over a hundred NYC–Boston trips at this point. I always sit in the rear half of the car in front of the dining car, since the door at that end will usually open up right in front of the escalator that I need to ride when I reach my destination. I sit on the left side, because I like to look at the view of Manhattan that is visible for around five or ten minutes after exiting the Queens Tunnel, heading north. I sit in an aisle seat, because there is a vent next to the window seat that is always blasting a steady stream of freezing cold air, seemingly regardless of the season.

And finally, I avoid sitting in or even near any of the sets of two side-by-side seats seats that face each other, with a table in between. I don't sit in those seats because I end up with a choice of either taking turns stepping on each other's feet with the person seated across from me, or keeping my feet uncomfortably tucked under my own seat. I don't like to sit near them because they tend to attract the occasional lucky group of travelers who will spend the ride unwinding by drinking one expensive beer after another from the dining car, getting louder and more obnoxious as the trip wears on.

One of the side advantages of sitting in an aisle seat is that there is a better chance that the other seat of the pair on that side of the aisle will remain empty. Apparently people are more inhibited about asking someone in the occupied aisle seat to grant them access to the empty window seat than they are about plonking themselves down in an empty aisle seat next to an occupied window seat. It's nice to be able to stretch out a little more with an empty seat next to me. An empty seat also means having potentially missed the opportunity to have been stuck next to some enormous guy who offends me in an olfactory manner (as, I regret to report, on this present trip), or possibly even next to a Republican.

Occasionally I find myself seated next to a sweet-smelling, fashionable young lady. You might think that I would prefer that to an empty seat. But based on experience I have concluded that I would almost prefer to sit next to the big stinky guy, for such fellow passengers often come equipped with cell phones, the kind that are covered with little hearts and rhinestones and such and are apparently also equipped with unlimited battery capacity. I will not attempt to recount some of the inane three-and-a-half-hour-long conversations that I have been treated to exactly one half of, but they are far more than I care to consider.

This whole system of boarding the train at Penn Station, or on Amtrak in general, really kind of baffles me. I have ridden trains all over Europe, and I can't recall ever being in a station of any size in which it was not known until the actual arrival of the train what track it's going to be coming in on. Trains run on a schedule, even here in the land of individualism; it's not exactly a mystery when they are going to arrive and when they are supposed to leave again. Surely it must be possible to make arrangements for a given train to arrive and depart on the same track every time, as is done in any other modern, industrialized country. What lunatic sociopath came up with this crazy system of train roulette?

The other thing that sort of mystifies me is why they can't just offer reserved seating on Amtrak. If I could reserve my seat, I wouldn't be in such a panic about getting on the train as one of the first passengers; even if I were the last guy on, my seat would still be there, patiently awaiting my bottom. In Germany, where I have my most extensive train riding experience, not only do trains miraculously arrive on the same track every time they come, they also give you the option of reserving a seat on any long-distance train. Your ticket tells you which numbered car, and which numbered seat within that car is yours; on the track, there is a kind of visual directory (the Wagenstandanzeiger—one of my favorite compound nouns) that tells you in which section of the track your car will be stopping. Why can't we have that here?

Ordnung muß sein

But I guess I'm going to have to leave you to ponder that on your own. My train is about to arrive at my stop, so it's time to close up shop. Happy trails to you.

Cold Dead Hands

I got an unexpected piece of mail today. It was one of those envelopes that pretty obviously contains advertising while at the same time attempting to convey the message, "Treat me with respect, for behold: I contain something official and important." In large type above the address window was printed "Registered Documents Enclosed". In the upper left-hand corner there was the admonition, "ATTENTION: Carbon copies enclosed—Handle with care". Somehow the picture of a pocket knife with the legend "Free Knife!" seemed out of step with the otherwise serious-looking envelope. Looking carefully at the picture of the pocketknife, I noticed that it bore the logo of the National Rifle Association.

Yow, free stuff!

Now let me tell you something about me. I like shooting guns. I had a BB/pellet gun from the time I was around ten years old. I never missed out on the chance to go to the rifle range at Scout camp (yes, I was also a member of that organization). I spent my high school years in a rural area in Northern California, where guns, mainly rifles and shotguns for hunting, were pretty common. Some of my friends hunted with their fathers and owned firearms of their own. A couple had .22 rifles; one had a .22 magnum pistol that was a lot of fun to shoot; a couple had 12- or 20-gauge shotguns. A favorite pastime was to have a parent—yes, a parent—buy us a few boxes of shotgun shells and a box of clay pigeons, which we would take out to a flat, largely deserted area outside of town for some trap shooting using the shotguns that various friends owned.

Since my high school years I have rarely had the opportunity to do any shooting. The last time was probably a good 7–8 years ago when I was visiting my mother in a rural part of Texas and my stepfather brought out a .22 rifle and we went out and shot at a crude target we set up. I had forgotten how much fun that could be, but after we put the rifle away I didn't feel like I needed to go back out the next day and do it some more.

I've never owned a gun of my own, though I considered buying a shotgun of my own at one point in high school, so I wouldn't have to borrow someone else's gun to go trap shooting. But somehow I just found other ways to spend my somewhat limited money. I also never felt entirely comfortable with having a gun in the house, especially after an incident during my high school years in which a friend of mine accidentally discharged a rifle while unloading it and lightly injured a family member. This was a guy who had grown up around guns, and he was exercising due care, and yet this one time circumstances nonetheless conspired to remind us that these were dangerous weapons we were handling. Once I had kids of my own, the thought of having a gun in the house was entirely out of the question.

So why is the NRA looking to make me a member? Maybe it has something to do with the current push to tighten gun laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (and the Aurora theater massacre, and the Sikh temple shooting, and the Gabby Giffords Arizona shooting, and…). I'm sure they feel a need to mobilize and expand their forces. That's apparently why I "have been selected to represent gun owners in [my] area through this special survey". Said "survey" is one of those ridiculous pretend surveys that seem to be favored by right-wing organizations as part of their campaigns for donations and new members, in which you have a bunch of questions that are worded in such a way that it's pretty obvious how you are supposed to answer if you are not some kind of UN-loving commie scumbag. And, conveniently, there's a section at the bottom to fill out in order to become a member and claim that cool free pocketknife.

Remember your credit card number,
that's the part that matters.

I have no idea why the NRA is looking to me to join their ranks. Maybe everyone on the street got one, or maybe they got my name from the same mailing list that used to cause me to inexplicably receive invitations to $10,000-per-plate fundraising dinners for George W. Bush. (Fun fact: I have actually been to NRA headquarters. It's in an innocuous-looking building in an office park in Fairfax, VA. Were it not for the gun museum on the ground floor, you would not know that you were standing on hallowed, Second Amendment-guaranteed ground. I wasn't there for the NRA; I was visiting a consulting client who, it turned out, also happened to be in the same building.) 

I'm really not the right guy to recruit for the NRA, though. I did say I like guns. I don't worship them, though, and I don't understand people who do. After the horrific mass murder of twenty small children, after all the mass shootings that preceded it, and in view of the general background of gun violence in this country, I don't see how any sane person can say that there should be no limits on gun ownership rights. And yes, I am familiar with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. It states, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." We get to have guns, but we get to have them in the context of "a well regulated militia". Ooh, there it is—that "R" word that gets NRA types so riled up.

Having read up a little (and I emphasize a little) on the history of the Second Amendment, I accept that at least some members of the Congress that produced it, as part of a process of debate and ultimate compromise, did think that those arms in the hands of the people were there as a check on the power of some hypothetical future tyrant. And I disagree with those who say that the prevalent weapon of the times was the muzzle-loading black-powder musket, so that's what the Second Amendment allows us to have today; we regularly interpret the US Constitution to apply the probable intent of its authors to technologies such as modern telecommunications that they could never have imagined. 

But let's be real. The US military has assault rifles, just like the "patriots" running around Montana in their camouflage fatigues. It also has a fair number of machine guns, mortars, grenades, rockets, artillery, tanks, armored fighting vehicles, attack helicopters and all manner of other assorted hardware that the camo crowd doesn't. Its members, insofar as they are not currently engaged in actual combat duty, train day after day after day in the use of all that stuff. The notion that some rag-tag guerrilla army of citizens armed with their Bushmaster rifles is going to somehow take to the hills and overthrow some future rogue government is just a childish Hollywood fantasy that is happily instrumentalized by the arms industry and their mouthpiece, the NRA. The NRA, whose letter that accompanies all of the aforementioned material begins like this:

Dear Mr. --------------

With the re-election of President Barack Obama, we must face the fact that we are at the beginning of a four-year nightmare.

You know as well as I do that our freedoms are in far greater danger of being dismantled and destroyed than they were four years ago—not just our Second Amendment rights but all the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.

The full weight of freedom's future is now on our shoulders…

And so on in the same vein. The letter goes on enumerate all the ways the NRA will fight for me. They will fight in Congress, they will fight Supreme Court nominees who don't share our interpretation of the Second Amendment, they will "fight to ban the U.N. from using even one thin dime of [my] tax dollars for their global gun-ban crusade." They will fight a bunch of other stuff as well, and all I have to do is send them twenty-five bucks. Such a deal! That's a lot of fighting for a paltry $25.

Actually, there's a bunch of other stuff I'd like them to fight for me. I'd like them to start with the Tiahrt Amendments, which prohibit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms from releasing data about the use of firearms in crimes and hinder law enforcement in various other ways. Oh wait, the NRA supports that, so never mind. Or how about if the NRA were to fight its own highly effective lobbying in Congress to prevent the Centers for Disease Control from studying the effects of guns and gun policies on firearms-related injuries and deaths? Not going to happen, I guess. The NRA wants to protect me by making sure that practically everyone has a gun, but they don't want to protect me from the downside of making sure that practically everyone has a gun, and they want to make it really hard for me to research what that downside might even be. Maybe that's partly why gun violence is listed as one of the factors that helps to keep my life expectancy among the lowest in any industrialized country.

I don't need to cite all the statistics about how severe gun violence is in the US compared to any other modern industrialized country. You've seen those before. You know there's a huge problem, even if you don't want to admit it. You may not agree with me on the solution. But I hope you agree that to shrug and move on is not the solution.

The NRA and its adherents insist that the solution to the problem of guns in the hands of bad people is to put more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Put guns in schools, guns in churches, guns in offices, guns in homes, guns everywhere, the theory being that if I have a chance to fight back I have a better chance of escaping with my life when some crazed gunman, or just a garden-variety criminal, points his weapon at me. In principle that sounds logical. In practice I'm not so sure. If I'm carrying a gun, it's probably going to be a handgun; I'm not likely to go everywhere with my trusty rifle slung over my shoulder; that's just a little too cumbersome. I will have to keep that handgun on me and easily accessible at all times, though. And have you ever fired a handgun? I have. Not many, but a few. And I can tell you that it's harder than it looks to hit what you're aiming at. So I guess I'll have to spend a lot of my limited leisure time practicing at the shooting range.

Now, add the adrenalin of an actual life-or-death situation; even with practice, I'm not a trained marksman, and I'm certainly not accustomed to armed combat. What's going to happen when the you-know-what actually does hit the fan? As I contemplate that I think about the recent incident in which a guy took out a gun outside the Empire State Building, fatally shot a co-worker and then carried out a gunfight with two police officers. The police killed the guy; in the process they also wounded nine bystanders who had the bad luck to have been there at the time, and I assume those policemen train regularly with their weapons. But what if instead of two policemen it had been two random citizens blasting away at the gunman—the NRA scenario? I suspect that the collateral damage might have been a lot more than nine bystanders wounded. To spin it a little further, what if other bystanders had been armed, and in the sudden confusion didn't know why those two guys were firing in their direction and decided to return fire? This kind of scenario is why I'm not so convinced that all of us running around like it's Dodge City in 1875 is such a brilliant idea.

Consider also what happens to guns that are kept in homes for "protection". I absolutely understand the impulse to want to protect oneself, one's loved ones, one's property from evildoers. That's not how it works out a lot of the time. I already mentioned the NRA's attempt to squelch research into gun violence; apparently that's partly the result of a study by Art Kellermann of Emory University that found that guns were 43 times more likely to kill a member of the gun owner's household than to kill an intruder.

So what's the solution? Maybe first we should agree what the problem is. The general problem is a country awash in guns, in which gun violence is far more prevalent than in any of the other modern nations we would view as our peers (okay, I know that we are better than every other country and therefore have no peers as such, but humor me). The more acute problem is that of mass killings perpetrated by deranged individuals wielding weapons that give them massive firepower. Where do we start?

Maybe we could start by taking some of those guns off the street, and making sure that way fewer of them even make it to the street. Institute a real ban on high-powered weapons and high-capacity magazines, and not one like the earlier so-called "assault weapons ban" that was so full of loopholes that it still enabled guns like the one used at Sandy Hook to be bought and sold perfectly legally. Make it illegal for anyone but a licensed gun dealer to sell a gun, the one exception being that a private citizen may sell a gun to a licensed gun dealer (but not to another private citizen), and register every sale; have ATF audit the books of the dealers to identify any possible funny business, and let the dealers pay for that through their license fees. Prohibit gun dealers from selling any weapon or magazine that falls under the new ban; have the federal government purchase those items at the dealer's cost and destroy them. To pay for that, tax gun and ammunition sales, and by more than just a token amount—gun-related violence creates huge costs to us as a society, so let people who want to own guns bear some of that cost. Make all of the restrictions on gun sales apply to gun shows just as to gun stores. Prohibit all sales of firearms, accessories and ammunition over the Internet or through the mail. Require all gun owners to carry liability insurance, just like we require car owners to do; hold them civilly and criminally liable if a gun they purchased is used in a crime.

At the same time we need to better manage who gets to buy guns. Above all, we need to eliminate the many holes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that is the basis for those background checks. Even John McCain, no bleeding-heart liberal he, was for that once upon a time. We also need to better ensure that people whose mental state should prevent them from ever owning a gun end up in NICS as quickly as possible. Currently, if I tell my therapist that I'm angry at the world and I'm going to get a gun and shoot as many people as I can, the shrink has no obligation to tell law enforcement about that—that should change. I know the argument is that breaching doctor-patient confidentiality in this way will make some people less likely to seek help for mental problems, but if you can make a professional judgment that someone is a danger to himself and others and should not have easy access to weapons, shouldn't the obligation to tell someone about that trump the confidentiality argument? According to the widow of a victim of the Aurora theater shooting, that answer would be "yes"—I will be interested to see where her wrongful death lawsuit against a psychiatrist who treated James Holmes goes. Maybe instead of trying to keep that important information from finding its way into NICS, we should be working to destigmatize mental health issues.

Finally, we need to do something about the culture of violence that permeates our society. I will confess up front that I have no idea how to do that. Maybe it's simply not possible to remove the archetype of the crusader who takes the law into his own hands, visiting righteous violence upon the bad guys, from our national psyche. That's been there for generations, but somehow something has changed; I know that back in the mid- to late seventies, when my friends and I were running around with guns as an instrument of leisure entertainment, the thought of taking them to school to seek vengeance for real or imagined slights would have been utterly inconceivable to us. Nowadays when I sit in front of my TV and a promo for the new Schwarzenegger film comes on,  much of it seems to be about the arsenal of weapons that he will employ over the course of ninety minutes or so, and I am mindful of the fact that these films, these TV shows, these video games in which the guns themselves are practically supporting characters… they generally come with "Made in USA" stamped on them. If I watch a detective show from, say, Belgium, or Australia, or Japan, at the end the hero will outwit the villain; in the American show the hero will as likely as not outshoot the villain. I'm not saying there's causality between violent media products and violent acts, but it's hard for me not to conclude that there's at least some correlation there.

Vice President Biden this week presented the findings of his gun violence task force to the President, who will be announcing some sort of policy initiative based on that. I hope that there will be some real effort to do something meaningful as part of that, and not just a lot of watered-down symbolism. And I hope that responsible gun enthusiasts will find something in there that they can also support. I am hoping that the nuts who spout that nonsense about giving up their gun "when they pry it from my cold dead hands" will get shouted down for a change. There have been plenty of cold dead hands already.

What Was, What Is, What Will Be—Part Two

I promised this story would be continued whenever I got around to it, so now I'm getting around to it. I know that you've been waiting in suspense to hear how it continues. Recall that when we left off, my job had just been saved by the appearance of a benefactor from the Far East, who had founded a new company, Phoenix, from the ashes of XYZ Corp. 

The initial period right after the creation of the new company was one of improvisation, because there were no physical facilities as such. Phoenix rented a couple of offices in one of those places that rents out temporary office space, and into that were crammed a few desks and some file servers and networking equipment. Most of us either worked remotely from home or at a client site.

Right before XYZ Corp. finally threw in the towel, I had been staffed on a project to redesign the Internet presence for a large regional bank. I was taking over the security design part of the project from a colleague of mine, a competent member of our information security group at XYZ, but a guy who was also a little over-intense in his devotion to the principles of what we in the business affectionately refer to as "infosec", and generally kind of an oddball; the kind of person who presents a happy, friendly facade but who simultaneously gives off a vibe of having  something dark and troubling bubbling away under the surface. At some point he mentioned to me that he took regular medication for chronic depression; I don't know why he felt like sharing this with me and it wasn't something I necessarily wanted to know anyway, but it did explain some things.

But as the uncertainty created by XYZ's slow death spiral mounted, it turned out that my colleague was having marital problems at the same time, and I guess the situation got to be too much for him at some point. He began skipping meetings and ignoring deadlines for the one project he still had—the aforementioned bank project—and ultimately stopped showing up for work at all. I was given the task of taking over his role and cleaning up the mess that he had left with what was now going to be my client. I hate taking on those kinds of assignments, since starting out a consulting assignment with an already irate client is generally somewhat less than amusing. But hey, this was no time to be picky about work assignments.

There was another complicating factor in all this as well. The bank we were working for had also been an investor in XYZ. Not a major investor, but the sum of money that their CEO had committed with great fanfare as part of a "strategic partnership" wasn't trivial, either. That commitment was not without controversy, coming at a time when XYZ was already on the ropes, and Mr. CEO was left with a fair amount of egg on his face when XYZ gave up the ghost just three months later. Word was that he was not terribly happy about this.

So I knew that the meetings I had scheduled for my first on-site visit on a Tuesday morning in early September of 2001 were going to be somewhat challenging, happening as they were under the double shadow of both the overall flame-out of XYZ and the acute mess that had been left by my now ex-colleague. The office I needed to visit was just over the border in a neighboring state, about an hour and a half away. I arranged to get a ride with another of my colleagues who was working with the client. It was a beautiful fall morning as we drove down there.

It was about 9 AM when we got into the building in which we were supposed to meet our other colleagues. I went to find the guy from Phoenix who was in charge of our group to ask where to park myself until my first meeting. He was on the phone with someone, talking in kind of an agitated way and saying things like, "a plane?" Another colleague turned to me to say that apparently an airplane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York.

I had been to the top floors of one of the towers a couple of times for business meetings and I remember watching the traffic of small planes and helicopters flying up and down the Hudson River and thinking how weird it was to be so high up in a building that I was actually looking down at air traffic going by. So when I heard that a plane had hit one, I assumed it must be an accident, that a small plane had somehow veered off course and into one of the towers. But when I finally got online a few minutes later and went to the CNN web site to get some details, I saw a picture of a gash across most of the front of the building that didn't look like it was made by a little four-seater Cessna. About the same time, the same colleague who earlier told me about the plane hitting one tower announced to whomever happened to be listening that another plane had just crashed into the other tower. I remember at that point just sitting down in a state of slack-jawed disbelief, with the feeling of all my blood rushing to my head, and thinking: This is Pearl Harbor. 

Somewhere in the midst of all this it was also announced that we all needed to attend a very important meeting at 10 AM with the client's management team. We spent the time until then doing the same thing as everyone else around us, i.e., scouring news web sites to try to find out what was going on. Somewhere in there it was reported that a plane had now crashed into the Pentagon as well. A little before 10 we all trooped off to our client meeting.

As the meeting was getting started, someone stuck his head in the room and announced that one of the WTC towers had collapsed. The meeting itself was a relatively short one. The gist of it was that the bank had had a relationship with XYZ Corp., and XYZ was no more. Nobody in the bank knew anything about this company "Phoenix", and certainly nobody from the bank had asked anyone from this unknown company to come on site, ergo our group had no reason to be there and we were to vacate the premises immediately. On the way out of the meeting room I paused to take in some news updates on one of the TV sets that had now been set up in various places in the office and learned that the other WTC tower had also just collapsed.

Ultimately, the work would resume, since Phoenix had in fact legally taken ownership of all of XYZ's client relationships and contracts, and the project would be brought to a successful conclusion. But for now, we just had to pack up and clear out. The immediate problem I had was that I had gotten a ride there with my one colleague, who had disappeared pretty much right after we arrived, and I hadn't seen him since, nor was he answering his cell phone. So I ended up sitting on a bench outside the office building for the next couple of hours until he eventually turned up and we drove home listening to the radio and trying to make sense of the events of the morning.

I arrived home to begin what would be days of shock, confusion, speculation, rumor-mongering and marathon CNN viewing. The sudden and unexpected demise of the bank project left me without much to do, but nobody was really doing much work anyway in those first few days after the attacks. A lot of people from our office had been traveling to client sites all over the country and were now stranded as a result of air traffic being suspended for the next several days, so the focus of company management was mainly on how to get everyone back home somehow.

That first week or so after the attacks was a very strange interlude. What I remember most of all was that it was just very quiet. Air traffic had come to a standstill, and so the accustomed periodic sound of planes heading to or from Boston Logan Airport, which is around 10–15 miles from my house, was strangely absent. Traffic of other kinds was also pretty low-key. Everyone was in a state of shock, wandering around in stunned silence, infused with a sort of undifferentiated dread about what might happen next. There was mass paranoia about vague, unconfirmed reports of plots to poison reservoirs or spray nerve gas over population centers from crop-dusting planes. The general mood was that we were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop, with no real idea about when or where or how that might happen.

The silence was initially broken for me by groups of people standing on various street corners around town waving signs that said things like, "Honk if you love America!" and cars honking back in response. I sort of understood the thinking and sort of didn't. Was this  the best we could come up with in the way of a response?

I of course wondered what this meant for me personally. Were we going to war? If so, with whom? If we've just relived Pearl Harbor, is the right thing to do to enlist in some branch of the military? That latter thought came and went quickly, considering that at that point I was already 40 years old, but it was there nonetheless. If I'm a citizen of this country, and this country is under attack, am I not obligated to do my part in some active way?

What I did expect to happen was to see my taxes raised to pay for whatever response was going to be undertaken. I hardly consider myself to be a hawk with regard to military matters, but I fully expected that part of the response to this event was going to be to rain down death and destruction on its authors, and I did not have a problem with that. And I emphasize: part of the response—more on that later. But I assumed that I and everyone else would  be asked to sacrifice in one way or another in order to support what was going to come next. 

Remember, this was only a couple of years after Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation", had been published. You may not have read the book, but at the time, all the media coverage would have ensured that you nonetheless would have been familiar with its theme: a celebration of the generation that endured the hardships of the Great Depression and then went on to endure the additional hardships of fighting and winning World War Two, a time in which every citizen was called upon to live with rationing of food and strategic materials, to scrimp and save and recycle, to pay his income taxes and the special Victory Tax and buy War Bonds to help finance the war effort, to supplement the food supply by planting victory gardens, and so on.

Donald Did His Part

I was of course asked to do no such thing. On the contrary, my president told me to go out and spend. He wanted me to "[g]et on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Instead of asking me to chip in a few bucks more to help fund the war in Afghanistan, and the one he had just started in Iraq, in 2003 he actually cut my taxes. My president didn't want me to sacrifice a thing. On the contrary, he wanted me to live my life as if absolutely nothing had changed. I know I'm not the first to make this point, but that doesn't make it any less valid: what a missed opportunity. In the wake of 9/11, Americans were ready to do whatever needed to be done, to contribute and to sacrifice whatever it would take to ensure such a thing would not go unanswered. But the leaders of our country just said, "Thanks all the same, but that really won't be necessary. Maybe you should take a nice vacation instead."

The other missed opportunity: the chance for maybe fifteen minutes of introspection. I in no way wish to excuse or apologize for the cold-blooded murder of thousands of people in the service of a political cause infused with a heavy dose of religious extremism. But when the president of the USA boiled the genesis of this event down to this: "Americans are asking 'Why do they hate us?'… They hate our freedoms.", he hardly did the citizens of his country a service. Sure, I  realize that from a rhetorical standpoint, a speech given a week and a half after the event was probably not the right time to say, "guys, maybe some part of this was our own fault." But there could have been a policy response that at least implicitly recognized this principle. We could have asked ourselves what these guys were so angry about that they would do such a thing, and whether we should at least consider what implications that might hold for how we comport ourselves. What did we get instead? A misguided effort to try and reshape the Middle East by force, framed in idealistic language but smelling suspiciously of an obsession with settling old scores, executed in breathtaking ignorance of the history and the political and ethnic dynamics of the region and leaving a legacy that I suspect we will all still be chewing on for many years to come.

More than a decade later, I'm reminded of all this more often than I would like to be. For the last nine months or so, every two to three weeks I find myself in the offices of a current client in Jersey City, NJ, which are situated right on the banks of the Hudson River, directly across the river from the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. Right outside the building is a monument consisting of a twisted hunk of steel from one of the World Trade Center towers. In the background, across the Hudson, I see the slowly rising frame of the new Freedom Tower, which in the course of various visits to NYC over the years I have watched grow from a muddy hole in the ground to its present state, in which it appears to have reached something approaching its planned final height of 1,776 feet. I think about the horrible spectacle for which the people in that building must have had a front-row seat on that day some eleven-plus years ago. I wonder what it will be like, when that new building has itself been standing complete for a decade or more, to convey to the generation looking up at it what it was like on that day in September of 2001.

What Was, What Is, What Will Be

So now I've veered way off course from my original story about how I found an old newspaper and what I found in it. I guess I'll tell you about that some other time.