Remembering

Seven years ago I was sitting in a hotel room in Japan, watching the world change.

I am over 7,000 miles from my wife. I am over 7,000 miles from my home and everything I know as daily life. Every airport in the United States has been closed.

http://siliconchef.com/2001/09/12/japan-home-sweet-home/

I don’t write as much as I used to, but 9/11 happened just a month after I started this blog. It was my real discovery of how the web could keep us all connected. I was a world away in Japan and not sure when I could travel back home,so my blog was a way to quickly let the world know how I was doing.

What I did on 9/11/01 is basically what I’ve done since: keep moving, keep working, don’t let it change the way I want to live my life. In 2001, I spent the day visiting customers and doing my job. The detachment from my home country was weird, but it gave me the real way to fight people that want to change my world to fit their view …

I keep living life the way I want to.

I’ve gone through the 2-3 hour lines at the airport. I’ve watched the TSA take shampoo, small knives and knitting needles in the name of safety. I’ve seen the posturing, posing and theatrics of what we call security over seven years and I don’t feel an ounce “safer” than I did on that 9/10/01 flight from Atlanta to Tokyo.

I’ve been bullied before. It was part of the geek’s life through middle school and junior high. It went away when two things happened.

1. I resisted enough to show I was not weak or compliant
2. Their violence would not change the way I lived my life

I didn’t make an effort to chase down and beat up bullies. I was no Batman … hell, I wasn’t even Aquaman. After a while I just didn’t want to put up with it anymore. The one who grabbed me ended up on the floor, the one who pushed me ended up kicked in the head. It wasn’t a war, it was a simple action/reaction response.

And through it all I was still the geek, the kid in the A/V club, the sole entry in the yearly computer division of the science fair. I was me.

I’ll fly next week, carrying the same random assortment of crap in my pockets that I always lug through security. I’ll probably be in Taiwan next month, dealing with the hassles of passport control and uniformed bureaucrats. They won’t make me any safer than I was seven years ago, but they don’t have to. My freedom isn’t guaranteed by them because it isn’t given to me … I already have it.

That’s what I never forget on 9/11 because I remember it every other day of the year.