Barbara Sparhawk

Christopher Ewing, fellow RedBubbler & superb photographer, wrote a heart-felt tribute on this day in his RB journal, “How 9/11 changed not only America, but the World”, and I encourage you to read it.
I responded on Chris’s comment page, and (okay it’s so me) my comment was lengthy. Chris made me think about what he’d said as well as what I was feeling. So I decided to put it in my journal, too.

Barbara Sparhawk, comment to Chris Ewing’s “How 9/11 changed not only America, but the World”:
In Yosemite I met an emergency room technician, who adopted a puppy 6 months before 9/11 and trained it for rescue, never understanding why he’d decided to get the dog or train it, though Yosemite uses dogs to find lost hikers. He named the dog Porkchop. That morning – September 11th – he saw on tv the NYC, Pennsylvania and DC bombings, called and volunteered. 2 days later he was headed across America with Porkchop, & word spread in advance. He was outfitted, fed, people paid for his gas when he pulled into stations in every state along the way, Porkchop was treated like the hero he soon became; a wilderness hiking company gave the man 800 pair of doggie booties to bring to NYC for the work the canines would be doing on glass and metal shards. They stayed two months helping collect bits of skin and bone and melted i.d. from over 3,000 human beings who were incinerated by madmen who find the west uncivilized. Conspiracies, Chris, are very hard to pull off. More than one person keeping a secret is an oxymoron, if you think out how that might have played out I don’t think it’s workable. I don’t believe our government, disagreeable and malicious as they sometimes are, would have engineered these three separate assaults. Bush waited 15 months before Iraq was invaded. Popular opinion and motivation had declined, if anything; if he’d longed for war he could have, like Clinton with Bosnia, made that decision without Congressional approval, on 9/12. I’m not sorry for the stand we’ve taken in Iraq or that a violent dictator and his sons whose national sport was rape rooms and putting contrary citizens feet first into shredders in front of their children, are gone. If we don’t react and respond to horror, we are all Germany in 1938.
I, too, am appalled at the changes that security and government imposition have brought to my America, and I don’t like it. I put my country’s flag up outside my house this morning, and it reminds me of what might be, and I will not forget what has been, nor our faults. Nor will I forget our courage in this extraordinary experiment of an emerging republic barely over 2 centuries old—still experiencing growing pains. My heart goes out especially today to those who, saw and lived through and then repaired our wounded Pennsylvania, DC, and New York City. Their fortitude reminds me most of what I love about Americans.