It started with 9/11

Yes it was indeed that particular September 11 of 2001 that started me on my road of, how can I phrase it, the way out of the mainstream, out of of the acceptable discourse between the right and the left and the somewhere center in between.
Although you wouldn't see it from the outside, but inside me I'm not there any more, there in the comfortable place that used to tell me that the world is basically alright as it is.
Today by means of a long and painful journey I've come to know, that that is just not true.
And it started on 9/11, though I had no idea then where I was going.

I remember that day clearly, as if it was yesterday.
On that very day my husband was to fly to the United States for the very first time in his life. He was to help a friend over there.
It was afternoon already here in Iceland. The kids were had just come home from school. I was home because I had been working the night-shift. We turned on the TV to look at the video text. That's where they show the flight schedule and if a plane is late or not. Everything seemed fine there, no delays, no cancellations.

Then we changed to a satellite channel to watch a game-show or cartoons for the kids. But there was neither. Instead an emergency news report, headed with bolt letters screamed at us: America under Attack
The first tower had collapsed already and we saw the re-play of that event once, twice, three times. We were told that at least three airplanes had been hijacked, two had been jammed into the WTC towers......

And then we saw the second tower fall... life
I heard my kids screaming: "It's the other building, the other sky-scraper is coming down!"
And I kept saying: "No, no, no it's the first one, it's just a replay." But it wasn't.
By now my husband had to leave to catch his plane. I told him, I think, that maybe it would be better not to fly and that they would probably cancel the flights anyway. But he is not the person to give up his plans, because of something as small as a hijacking threat, not if he could help it.
So he left, and me and the kids stayed home. All of us transfixed in front of the TV. And the next news came: "The Pentagon has been hit." And me, I became paralyzed, thoughts of overwhelming fear racing in my head. A tunnel vision if front of my eyes, no logic, just feeling: " This means World War III, the end of the world, the end of the world the end of...." I don't think I said it out loud or maybe I did, murmuring like a crazy woman. But I do remember the kids became scared as well.
Then the news of possible other hijackings, nobody knew how many, but had just crashed into a field.
My youngest son, 10 years old at the time, went to the phone calling his Dad, telling him what we heard on the news.
He didn't say it out loud, but I could hear it in the sound of his voice little voice: "Pabbi come home, please Pabbi come home. Don't go any further."
Eventually my husband did come home. Of course, all flights to the US had been cancelled.
He found me in a kind of daze, staring blankly at the TV screen, and the children in fearful excitement.
I had been incapable of saying anything, anything to calm them or tell them that it would be alright, because at that day, in those hours I did not believe that anything would be alright again.... ever
This was to be the end of the world......

But it was only the beginning of a new world, at least inside my mind, an opening that would allow something to push through.....knowledge, knowledge of truth unseen before...
But still not quite yet.
The next few weeks we watched the news more closely. Especially my youngest son did so. For weeks we found him every morning in the living-room sleeping in front of the Television. He had gotten up in the middle of the night and turned it on, not to watch cartoons or anything else kids his age normally watched, but instead he had turned on a 24 hours news channel to watch the news, only the news, day after day, after day.

When we heard that Afghanistan would be attacked we relaxed...It would be alright, this wasn't going to be WWIII after all, just some obscure place in the middle of Asia...a few bombs on the binLaden guy and on his caves and all would be over. It would be alright, it would be alright and we were going to be safe....

But this wasn't what happened, and Afghanistan was only the beginning. And what I had seen with my own eyes, the falling sky-scrapers in a cloud of dust were only a smoke-screen to something far, far worse.
How I found out about that, I'll tell you another time....