Push

Thunderstorm at the moment.

Summer's last push?

An anemic attempt, at best. All the components are present and accounted for: Rain. Periodic flashes of white. Cracks of thunder. But there is a tepidness at play here.

This storm is just an old man, slow moving, brittle-boned; muttering obscenities mostly under his breath; filled not so much with fury, as anguish.

And just like that, gone.

Thoughts on the day the sky fell, and the sky from which it fell

It's been a long, hot summer.

Last week brought a string of scorchers, five or six days straight above 90 degrees. The air was dense and motionless, wearing the unique reek of summer's climax like a sweater. Over the weekend, that pressure cooker popped its top. Thunderstorms blew through the area, and when they had passed, I stepped outside to find it was almost twenty degrees cooler. The air had thinned out, started moving again, busily sweeping up the moisture, pushing it eastward in pursuit of the storms that had left it.

My heart raced for the invigorating change. I could sense the skulk of autumn through the late August night, even thought I felt the finest wintry tendril, still just a baby, coil around my ankle, trying to gain purchase.

This morning, post Labor Day, it was downright chilly. Not quite a freeze, but that fine wintry tendril definitely having grown four fingers and an opposable thumb to grip with. I took a walk along the river, and when the sun rose over the horizon, the light swept across the treetops, illuminating dabs of bright color where before there had been none. And the sky was smooth like glass, azure in color.  Dry, cloudless.

Absolutely cloudless.

I have always loved this time of year. But the fresh, reborn air comes with a tremor now. Dismay and unease are implicit in the otherwise simple gesture of looking up.

This morning's walk took place in precisely the same conditions I awoke to nine years ago; awoke, with no clue at all that the very dynamic of my life - and every American life - was going to change forever in a matter of hours. I kept looking up repeatedly at the flat blue expanse dampened by bright sunlight, hoping against hope it would tell a different story, a better story, a less frightening story.

It didn't.

Almost a decade later, I still can't help but cringe a little. It is no longer the September sky I remember in my youth - heralding school, Halloween, a gentle reminder, even, in my overly eager child's mind, that Christmas was out there somewhere.  It really isn't the "September sky" at all, now. It's the 9/11 sky, and it no longer gets me looking forward. It forces me to look back.

For the most part I've moved on, sanitized that day sufficiently, where I can live without thinking about it all the time. That wasn't always the case, but I've gotten better as the years have peeled away (time does heal all wounds, it would seem). But on mornings like this, which remind me as much of how I felt before the first airliner struck as how I felt the rest of the day, my thoughts can't help but turn plaintive:

Was there ever a time when we weren't anxious and uneasy in this country? Ever a time when we were not at war, not accustomed to heightened security and terror alerts? Were we ever not one inattentive baggage checker (in this country or abroad) away from planes being blown apart over major cities, one jihadist's inability to light the fuse correctly removed from another set of thousands dead on our streets? Were our armed forces ever not mired deeply in Iraq and Afghanistan? Was there ever a time when the music of Eminem was considered the biggest threat to the country, our President's sexual peccadilloes the country's greatest scandal and hottest topic? I want to go back there.

It's been a long, hot summer, but an even longer, hotter decade. And we are halfway to an entire generation coming of age knowing nothing BUT being at war.

The debate has been on-going for years the best way to commemorate 9/11. To tell you the truth, I don't care if it is ever commemorated in official channels. I don't need a national holiday or a monument. I don't need a day off from work or a new tower replacing the old towers to remind me of September 11th, 2001.

9/11 shows up in my mind uninvited, stays too long sometimes, like a bad guest. It replicates snapshot after postcard snapshot, clogging the hard drive of my memory with images I can't erase, like a malicious computer virus. I see towers of smoke and fire running parallel to the ground; human bodies falling a thousand feet; buildings falling a thousand feet; Olympic-sized billows of bright white dust chasing throngs of hysterical New Yorkers down streets, through cement canyons, around corners. I see heads held together with blood soaked bandages; faces covered in dust like theater performers, clumped wetly around the mouth and eyes.

I can still hear the low-slung roar of jet engines on a destructive course, the non-stop peal of sirens, a veritable chorus of shrieks and panicked (or dazed) profanity. I hear television newscasters bleating off report after report, trying to keep up - another plane down, this time in Washington, then another in Pennsylvania, then this tower fell, and that tower fell - endless speculation as to the potential death toll, the search for survivors, and who was responsible...I see myself watching the television with shocked co-workers, all of us wondering if it was ever going to end, and feeling, though we were safely fifteen hundred miles away, an acrid mixture of anger and fear (maybe not so safe, after all), and worse, a real sense of the change at hand, that nothing was going to be the same, that things were going to suck for a long time afterward.

And so they have.

All of it took place under the same sky I saw this morning on my walk: post-stifling summer heat / pre-killing autumn frost. Right at the negotiations of the seasons.

I don't like to think about this time of year, and the calm, restful conditions normally associated with it, being inextricably linked with terror, but it has come to that. The first couple of years I should have expected it. But it's been almost a decade, and still:

It's supposed to be 'back to school time', but it's 9/11 time.

It's supposed to be NFL time, but it's 9/11 time.

It's supposed to be harvest time, but it's 9/11 time.

For a full week each year, the TV flares up with a toxic prescription of specials and remembrances as exploitative as they are commemorative. The news media talking heads pinch off what they remember in two-cent portions, each year, like me, a little tireder-looking, a little grayer. The President speaks. We pray. But we don't forget. We won't forget.

We can't forget.

No matter the outcome of the War on Terror - if it ever ends or can ever be won - the terrorists scored a major victory that day. They have forever altered the way I view my world. Not 'The World' - faraway lands mired in complex geo-political machinations I only hear about on the news - but my world, my interpretation of my surroundings as I do something as routine as take a morning walk in no less a benign place than west-central Wisconsin. And one day, I will be a grizzled old man walking slowly along a shoreline somewhere, and if it's the right sky hanging above me, the September sky, I know that I will cringe then, as I cringe now.

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Sadly, it may be impossible to forget the horror completely, but it helps to remember the heroes that were made that day, the courage that got called up - from NY Port Authority workers, members of the NYPD and FDNY, first responders at the World Trade Center and Pentagon (all intrepidly rising to the call of duty), to the civilians who stepped up at both locations to help out (notable among them, Hudson River boat operators tirelessly transporting victims from the New York side the the New Jersey side), to the individuals who staged a revolt against the hijackers on Flight 93 in the sky above Pennsylvania (and likely saved countless lives in doing so), to the innumerable volunteers who from 9/12 on donated their time and money to recovery, to everyone else ceaselessly donating their thoughts and prayers.

It's comforting to know a kind of clarified heroism can arise in times of crisis. It may very well need to be called upon again one day.

'Brusque and Cranky' has no place in the friendly skies

NOTE: Since I began writing this, The Huffington Post, which, though I am a fan, routinely reveals a glaring immaturity amidst its news writers (as though its entire staff is comprised of 22-year-old interns), has wisely changed 'captured the nation's imagination' to 'captured America's attention', along with other story updates. But I left it in my post. It's truly how it read this morning, and, I believe, in part exemplifies my point.

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So, the 'famed' JetBlue flight attendant who, according to The Huffington Post, 'captured the nation's imagination' when he snapped like a twig and took a ride down an emergency chute is no longer employed by the airline.

Following an August 9 altercation with a passenger aboard JetBlue flight 1052, which had just landed in New York from Pittsburgh, Steven Slater reportedly unleashed a profanity-laden tirade on the airliner's PA system, announcing he was quitting his job then exiting through an emergency slide he deployed himself. He then disappeared across the tarmac and went home, where he was later arrested.

A spokesperson for Slater says Slater wanted his job back, but JetBlue announced yesterday, without going into details, that he was no longer employed by their company. Since the incident he had been suspended, pending an investigation. Now - at least for now - he is unemployed.

Good.

'Captured the nation's imagination'...??? Seriously?!

There has been way too much talk in the last month painting Slater as some kind of folk hero, too many people happy (desperate?) to play devil's advocate by trying to understand his point of view, even applauding the flourish with which he made his grand exit, as though he did it on behalf of working class people everywhere. One HuffPost reader commented, of his purported frustration, 'we've all been there'; another stated that quitting while 'giving the company a big middle finger' was better, at least, than going on a murderous workplace rampage.

Uhh...okay? Someone shits on my front porch, I don't excuse it by giving thanks he didn't shit in my bath tub.

To boot, a reported tens of thousands of on-line 'fans' have been pushing to persuade JetBlue to reinstate Slater, evincing sympathy for this guy by trotting out some tired old 'us against them' argument - corporate America v. everyman.

What. The. Fuck. ?.

In fairness, not everyone is on Slater's side (most importantly JetBlue). It has been acknowledged that most passengers who witnessed the altercation (with a woman, reportedly over a carry-on bag) claim not only that Slater was the instigator but, perhaps of greater significance, 'brusque and cranky' throughout the flight.

Soo...WHO are the tens of thousands of fans trying to make excuses for the culmination of his 'brusque and cranky' behavior, exactly? They obviously weren't on the flight. Do they know what actually happened?

Have they ever flown?

When I walk into a Starbucks and encounter a 'brusque and cranky' worker pouring my Venti black...or frankly, when I notice that the individual assembling my sub sandwich, depositing my paycheck, pumping my gas, bagging my groceries, helping me find Season 4/Disc 3 of The Office, installing my DVR, fingering through a drawerful of prescriptions on my behalf, mixing me a Captain and Coke, pouring me a glass of wine, or cutting off a piece of peanut butter fudge for me to sample seems 'brusque and cranky', I get indignant. I suddenly don't want them helping me. Doesn't matter how short-lived their involvement in my day might be, I don't want them involved at all. I don't want them knowing what I watch, or what medication I've been prescribed, or touching my food, if they're - for whatever reason - going to be 'brusque and cranky' about it.

NOBODY involved with whisking me or anyone else away at 35,000 feet - from the individual piloting the big bird, to the person wheeling a cart full of peanuts and Sprite down the center aisle, to the person back at the airport scrubbing the toilet where I (accidentally, to be sure) splashed a little on the floor - should be allowed, CAN be allowed, to get 'brusque and cranky'.

I can imagine, probably more than it seems reading this post, that being a flight attendant is a difficult occupation; I really can. And I'm not completely without sympathy. The relationship between 'server' and 'customer' in any arena is inherently perverse. I myself while away my work week on the 'server' side of things, and from that experience alone, I have no doubt that a large number of airline passengers are awful (beyond 'brusque and cranky') on any given day. I'll even go so far as acknowledge the strong possibility that the woman involved in the altercation with Slater was a real pill.

Tough shit. Deal with it. Keep it together. You're NOT assembling a sub sandwich, Mr. Slater; there is nothing innocuous about your involvement with my life for the duration of the flight. You are, in part, responsible for my life; for ensuring my safety and comfort not only 6.62 miles above the Earth, but from the moment I walk into one airport until the moment I walk out of another...in the post 9/11 world, to boot, where long lines, delays, diverted flights, cancellations and a general sense of unease have become the norm. If you can't handle it, find another line of work.

I hear Subway is hiring...

Is this unreasonable?

Considering reports that he was the instigator, and a lack of anyone willing to corroborate his side of the story, Slater's actions should not have 'captured' anyone's imagination, nor should he be lauded as some kind of Robin Hood. He is at best, and this is a stretch, Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. And even if one is determined to support some imagined cause, there is no excuse for the 'flourish' of his exit. Slater could just as easily have told the woman where to stuff her carry-on bag, quietly left the plane and never come back. No childish public address tirade or emergency chute descent was necessary, or appropriate.

Not in the post-9/11 world. Not in the post-underwear bomber world.

JetBlue should have fired him immediately, not weaseled their way through a month of 'suspension, pending investigation' corporate blah-blah, allowing his folk hero status to take root, then allowing him to claim, as he is now, that he resigned. Symbolically, it would have helped their cause if they'd displayed an immediate zero tolerance policy. That Slater still faces charges of criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and trespassing is a good sign justice, of some sort, will be served.

But folk hero status has long shown itself to be a dysfunctional phenomenon. Once the legal dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from, or about, Steven Slater again. Another airline will pick him up, probably, sure to command an unholy amount of news coverage and analysis when it happens...or we just might whiff a reality show in the works at some point.