I was doing my morning workout, watching the Fox News Channel, and the headline story was some California Congressman caught cheating on his wife. It bored me.
When I got to my office, I turned on CNBC for business news when the first reports came in about a plane crashing into the Trade Center. Details were limited until the second plane hit the second tower. “We are under attack,” was what the announcer said, and they were getting telephone reports from Maria Bartaromo from the Stock Exchange.
Then the towers collapsed, and we heard about the attack on the Pentagon, and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
I closed my accounting office and kept it closed for the next day.
My girlfriend, now my wife, called from her Baltimore office and asked if we were under attack. It was particularly chilling for her because when she was 16, she and her family were flying home from Israel when some Palestinian terrorists led by Lila Halid attempted to hijack the plane.
It was defeated by a combination of airline personnel, Israeli security agents, and angry passengers. It had been just that previous Saturday evening that she told me about it while we were having dinner in a Persian restaurant in Baltimore.
“the headline story was some California Congressman caught cheating on his wife.”
If not for this tragedy, Gary Condit would have been national news for months to come.