Anniversary of a Tragedy

So, it is September 11th...  We all know what happened on this day in 2001.  We all know where we were on this day in 2001.  We all know about the tragic events that occurred and how they are still impacting our lives and world today.

Me - I was awake and getting ready to go to work.  At the time, I worked for an investment bank in San Francisco, and it was the first day of our annual investment conference (a very big deal at the time).  I had to be at work by 7am PT.  I had to wear a suit that day because of the conference.  As I was in the process of putting on make-up and deciding which suit to wear, I was watching the morning news to see what was going on in the world, and what the weather would be like so I would know what to wear.  When I turned on the news that morning at around 5:30am PT, I remember seeing on every channel, reporters showing a building in New York smoking and on fire.  They knew a plane had run into one of the World Trade Center buildings, but not why it ran into the building.  On the channel I was watching, the newscasters were speculating that perhaps an airport beacon wasn't working properly and led the plane to the building by mistake.  Then as I was pulling up my tights, I watched in horror as the 2nd plane slammed into the South Tower.  I stood there half clothed, mouth agape, tears streaming down my face.  My home phone rang a few minutes later and one of my co-workers told me not to come to work, as they were evacuating all landmark buildings in SF because they didn't know what else was going to happen.  At the time I worked in the TransAmerica Pyramid.  She told me the conference was cancelled indefinitely, and she would call me later and let me know what to do the next day, in terms of coming to work or not.  I called my friend, Amanda, whose sister lived in New York to make sure she knew what was going on and to be sure her sister was Ok.  Then I called my dad for some reassurance of something.  We stayed on the phone a while, mostly in silence, until the buildings started to collapse.  I watched that on live TV also.  At that point, I had to get away from the television, so I went out for a walk in my neighborhood, and pondered life and what was happening to thousands of innocent people and their loved ones.

Fast forward to today - September 10, 2014.  My husband and I had the final episode of season 1 of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson to finish and delete from the DVR.  The show played a quote from the late Caral Sagan that for some reason struck a chord for me.

Here is the quote by the brilliant Carl Sagan:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

It makes me think - what the hell are we humans doing to each other?

I didn't know it until tonight, but in 1997 Carl published a book (among many other books) titled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.  That just might be my next book.

My life motto:  Treat others how you wish to be treated.

Wish more people could do that.

Earth is the tiny speck of light in the middle of the reddish stripe of light on the right side of the picture.  This photo was taken by cameras on Voyager 1, launched from Earth on September 5, 1977.  The picture was taken when Voyager 1 was 4 Billion miles away from Earth.  

We, all humans, are floating on a speck of sand in an infinite universe.