 And we're back, we're live on a special show. This is America Finding Its Way with me and Tim Apochella. I'm Jay Fiedel and today we're going to remember 9-11. It's coming up a couple of days and it's very important that we spend a little time evaluating where we were then and where we are now. Tim, welcome to the show. And I want to, if you don't mind, mention that you told me you lost sleep over the subject last night. Can you talk about it? Sure. I was prepared to discuss with you a different topic, depending on September 18th rally at the Capitol that's coming very soon. And then we switched gears to talk about 9-11. And I really didn't want to deal with it. And so about two in the morning, I'm wide awake and all the memories start flooding into my head and not able to go back to sleep. So I started writing my notes for the show. So memories kind of odd. You remember that what you remember and you try to categorize things in different places of your mind and you push away some things and you try to recall other things. And I think sometimes our memories are directly attached to smell and taste, but also emotions. And it's true. And 9-11 was a horrific emotional day for all Americans. There's no two ways about it. And I think we all remember things differently. It was personal. For me, if I can tell you how it all came to my attention. So if this is, what, 9.45 in the morning, something like that when they hit the first tower, I was sleeping and the phone rang and it was my brother. He was living in Washington at the time. And he said, go to your television set. I said, what? He says, I'm not gonna say anymore. Just go to your television set. I'm gonna hang up, go to your television set. And there was a certain urgency in his voice and in that message, I knew there was something really serious happening. So I went to the television set and lo and behold, there was a burning tower and a perfectly blue sky. It was unbelievable, it looked like fiction. And I woke my wife up. Now there's a picture of it. I woke my wife up and it was at this moment, this very picture that I saw, the second plane. And I said, oh my God, this cannot be an accident. The second plane removes all doubt about that. This is terrorism, really deadly, lethal, terrible terrorism. I called him back and I said, wow. I said, you know, Jean, this means the world will never be the same. That was my reaction. The world will never be the same. When we agreed the world will never be the same. And that opens the whole inquiry as to how the world changed and it did. And it's hard to remember things 20 years ago. It's hard to un-vary history, if you will. But for this accumulation today, it seems to me that's a fundamental point. The world has never been the same. It isn't the same. Somehow that event unraveled us, all of us. That's the way I felt that day. I can see it in the future. Sometimes you see clearly. Where were you when you saw, when you heard? Well, I was living in Seattle and so we're three hours behind time. And by the time I got up and stumbled into the bathroom, I'm sure it was around seven o'clock Seattle time. So that means the first tower was well under fire. The plane had done its damage. The second plane had not arrived. And I got the similar message, get out here. You better come and see this. My wife was telling me, come and see this now. And the first thing I knew, or the first thing I saw, what flashed in my mind was, oh, they finally did it. Because remember in 1993, there was a truck bomb that hit the North Tower. And my father happened to be working right across the street when that bomb blew up and did some horrible damage to the Twin Towers. And I said, they finally succeeded. That was the first thing that kind of ruled through my thought. And then as I'm watching this unfold, I'm watching and I'm thinking Pearl Harbor. Now, I know it must feel like back in 1941 to be informed or witness in Honolulu, Pearl Harbor, or hear it on the radio. There was no television that broadcast that. And so those things were, from a historical perspective, were rolling through my mind. And then like you, when I saw the second plane, I said, we're at war. And things as we know it will never be the same. So I have a very, very similar thought that you did. I try to vocalize it to my wife at the time. And I remember everybody was watching television and comparing notes and commiserating and then thinking, this is awful. We don't know the end of it. Who's to say that these three planes were the end of it? Like that four planes. Who's to say that this attack was over at any point? Who's to say that it wasn't gonna happen again? And although we learned to be complacent in the months and years that followed, you could ask yourself the same question today. Who's to say that it's over? Some reason the United States is a target and it could happen again. In fact, shockingly enough, it could happen out of Afghanistan again. Al Qaeda or ISIS could use places of base of operations. We don't have a lot of control over that. Interestingly, that the greater likelihood is a terrorist attack coming from the Middle East or Central Asia. That I don't think we're necessarily safe. And furthermore, it doesn't have to happen in the way of an explosion. It could happen by cyber terrorism. Any number of things by cyber terrorism extended to social media terrorism is happening. It was an article yesterday's paper about it. If you thought that Russia and the Internet Research Agency and Vladimir Putin was attacking the United States was cyber attacks, so is China. Our intelligence agencies have revealed, so is China. I thought the Chinese were relatively innocent about that but they're not. So it made us less secure and to the point where we are complacent as a country, we don't realize we're in a global mind field. The fact is that we are vulnerable and that hasn't changed since 9-11. I wanna tell you one more story, Tim. And this was a very interesting experience. A year or two after 9-11, I was in the High-Tech Development Corporation. It's now called the White-Tech Development Corporation. It's an attached agency to debate. I was on the board there. In fact, I was the chair of the board there. And I urged the directors to take a trip at their own expense to China. And so a number of them went to China with me and we took our executive along and he organized people for us to meet in various cities in China. If you remember, China was ascending then and everyone liked China. They wanted to have a better relationship and so forth. So one of the people he introduced us to at a breakfast meeting, her name was Valerie Yee. I'll never forget that. Make that Lee, L.I. And Valerie Lee was a lawyer. She had a graduate degree as many Chinese lawyers have. And she told a 9-11 story at the breakfast meeting which I will never forget. After they graduate law school, they take graduate law degrees anywhere in the world. And she took a graduate law degree at NYU, which is my alma mater. And NYU is very real estate rich in the southern part of Manhattan. So they put her up in a dormitory at NYU in what happened to be right down next to the Twin Towers. And she arrived there on September 10th. And she unpacked her stuff and was so excited. Remember September, that's when classes start, right? And she unpacked her stuff. She's ready to go to class the next day. And lo and behold, the next day is 9-11, the attack. And her building had to be evacuated. It was right across the street. And so she didn't speak a lot of English. Nobody around her spoke Mandarin. She has just arrived in the country. She doesn't even know where NYU is. So she gets out on the street and all the cinders and the smoke and things falling off the building. And she starts working uptown. Lost, completely lost and terrified. What an experience, you know? She's in her early twenties. A guy comes out of the crowd and he says to her, are you Valerie Lee? And she says, yes. He says, I'm with the alumni of NYU and we are here looking for you. You know, Jay, 9-11 was the worst. You know, it's almost cold dickens. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And for everything that was horrific and horrible and devastating and the deaths and the firemen, the police, all the people in the building, we had the tragedy of the death. It was also a shiny moment. Just that story you just relayed. It was a shiny moment. And I started thinking about what the shiny moments were. And there were heroes everywhere. The firemen rushing into the building, the police rushing into the building. Those heroes, the people that came down to try to help however they could. A bucket brigade here and there. A lot of people don't know this, but 500,000 people were evacuated off the island to New Jersey. Dunkirk was 300,000. These boats came in without a clue. Where to dock? How to dock? Just taking on scores of people left and right all day long and ferrying them back to New Jersey. There are countless stories of heroics and it is touching. It's, you know, they say 9-11 was America's finest moment. Too bad those days are gone right now. Well, let's talk about that. You know, I don't know if you saw this one called Turning Point. Turning Point was about 9-11. It was on, I forget what channel. I think it's on Netflix. And a remarkable documentary and it focuses on 9-11, but at the same time, its mission is to show you 20 years before 9-11 and then of course, 20 years after 9-11. So it gives you historical context, which, you know, we really, we all really need to appreciate it. Not just that day, as you say. And, you know, it was predictable. Not only the first attempt on, you know, the Twin Towers back in 93, but, you know, the whole degradation of the relationship of the U.S. with the Middle East and how we made all these foreign policy errors and how they got to dislike us and how we kind of messed up on the wrong, riding the wrong horses all the time. So we should look at that, the 20 years ramping up. We could have seen it coming. No question. You know, I mean, they argued at the time about how one government agency didn't tell another, but it's much more than that. We didn't see it coming. We were being complacent and isolationist, relatively speaking. After Vietnam was understandable, but we were not globally thinking. After 9-11, and this documentary turning point goes into this, I find this the most interesting part. As you say, it was our finest moment. People came from all over the country to volunteer. Firemen, the 3,400 firemen were killed knowing that they were putting themselves in harm's way and being crushed in the building. These beds lined up on the street by volunteer hospitals awaiting people who were injured and never receiving people who were injured because nobody was injured. They were all just killed. It's so shocking. Anyway, that was 9-11. And for the week or two or three or even a couple of months after that, we were the finest generation. It was the high point of at least after the Second World War, the high point of American courage, American togetherness, but somewhere between then and now, we became complacent. We forgot, we lost that togetherness. No one can say we're together now. How did we lose that? How did we lose that special patriotism that 9-11 gave us at least for a while? You have any thoughts? Yeah, the one that keeps coming to my mind, I can't let go. And it was one of my least favorite presidents and that was George Bush Jr. If you remember up to 9-11, we started getting all sorts of violence against the Muslim community, specifically the Moss and they were being targeted for vandalism and in the streets, Muslims were being attacked and harassed. And to George Bush's credit, and I'll never forget it, he met at the Islamic center in Washington, D.C. And he quoted from the Quran and he said, in the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. And then he said, in the face of terror, it is not true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists didn't represent peace, they resented evil and war. What George Bush did was uncharacteristic of politics of the day and that is, fuel it, milk it, expand on it, take the hatred and the propensity for discrimination and use it for political purpose and means. You have to remember George Bush's favorability ratings before 9-11 were pretty poor, they were in the dump. And he didn't do that. He actually went out there to protect the Islamic community and he put a face on it that I never expected he would do. And I was proud of my president. And it was touchy that he would probably go against many people in his party that, I'm sorry, but over the decades, there's always been a dog whistle about race-baiting and phobias against Islam and all these things. And he didn't take the political bait and he did what I thought was a admirable thing to do, an honorable thing to do and he did it. Yeah, but I think of him, I think of WMD. Yeah, I do too, that came later. I think him going into Afghanistan was the right thing at the right time for the right reason. American people wanted him to do that. It wasn't for punishment necessarily, it was to cut the root of the poison plant, so it wouldn't happen again. And he was there, we were there. We had actually beat the Taliban. We were in a position where we could really make something of that adventure into Afghanistan, but we failed and we stayed too long. And we didn't achieve what the original mission was and should have been. And the reason, at least one big reason for that was the stupidity of a weapons and mass destruction in Iraq. I don't know what was on his mind. At the time, I thought, well, he's trying to finish the unfinished business that his father had left in the first Iraq war, but that was stupid. It was not appropriate and he should have known from his staff that it was not gonna work, but they all lied about WMD. And then you get this recurrence of people out there in the community starting to disbelieve the government, starting to lose confidence in the government. So what Bush, what the federal government gained in the days and weeks after 9-11, they soon enough, they lost it. And the tragedy of WMD and the war in Iraq was not so much that there was no WMD. It was that that lie, you know, took away the togetherness, the solidarity that had been foisted on us, that we experienced as a result of 9-11. And that has put a shadow over all the years since. I know you can't forget that because it was the same kind of thing that we experienced during Vietnam, government lying to us on a regular basis and the press, the media not vetting the lies. And then you add- Well, you had a wave of patriotism. You had a wave of, you know, I'm sorry, but after George Bush was on that mound of rubble and there was the fire chief next to him in the American flag as a backdrop. And remember, you said, I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world can hear you. And the people and the people who knock down these buildings soon they will all hear from us. Remember that? That was in that one video op. He gathered a nation's patriotism to exact revenge. And that first, that first entree was in Afghanistan. And there was overwhelming support in Congress. I think only a few didn't want to go there. And maybe Joe Biden didn't want to go in there. I can't remember. But the bottom line is he had the nation in the palm of his hand as far as their commitment to approve a military action, a war. How often does that happen? Not a lot. He got Congress to approve the use of violence in a very vague resolution. And then he misused that. And he used that for other adventures as well. And so Iraq was much more dangerous and deadly and ill-conceived than we even thought at the time. I don't know about you, but I smelled a rat on WMD right there. And then you got guys who seemed to be heroes at the time, Rudy Giuliani. I mean, he was really at the top of the heap. And a lot of people thought he was a better leader in those moments. He became America's mayor. Yeah. And look how things have changed. Now he's a bum. And it's like 20 years is a long time. Things change. And it's tragic to see how great opportunities for coming together, for healing the wounds of Vietnam. Those opportunities were essentially lost and squandered. And of course, Trump has no concept of history or connecting the dots or foreign policy. And he squandered it further. So here we are 20 years later. And I think we've lost the lessons of 9-11-9. Hate to say that. We still have the pain. And there are still families out there missing a loved one. And the media is daily giving us more documentary remembering of what happened. But as a country, it just seems a very long time ago when we went together over that issue. What do you think? Well, I always refer to history and how cause-effect plays into history that affects our future. And for me, 9-11 was a cause-effect issue to a certain degree. And you have to remember, we trained Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was one of the Mujahideen. And we helped the Mujahideen force Russia out of Afghanistan. And so this says that when you make an ally, when you make a partner, if they don't have the same maybe ideals and values that you do and you're making a deal with a party that is the antithesis of what you're all about, that partnership may come back to haunt you. And 9-11 is an exact example of that partnership that went south, went sour on the United States. So cause-effect and as we move forward with our foreign policies, for God's sake, let the military, let the Congress realize that for every policy, there's a reaction to it, maybe a ego or a greater reaction to it. So let's enter our policies carefully. Let's enter war gingerly in the last effort that should ever be done is to enter war without first exploring diplomacy and working with your allies and working with the other nations in the world to try to resolve and dampen down a conflict rather than jump to war. And I agree with you, Iraq was a jump to war. Afghanistan was probably a very war to think to knock Al-Qaeda out of the caves and tried to hit Osama bin Laden. But after this first six months, we should have realized, A, he wasn't there and B, there's nothing left in there. So we should have just pulled out. What did you think when Barack Obama announced that he had been, Osama bin Laden had been killed? Just desserts. This man caused the destruction and death of many souls. And not only that, but the consequences after that. How many Afghans died? Civilians died from indiscriminate shelling and bombs. The man set out to do what he did. He was a terrorist and he basically was hunted down as a terrorist and he was killed as a terrorist. And so it was a just thing to do. Unfortunately, it took way longer than I thought it would to actually find him and capture and kill him. Yeah, one of the documentaries I saw suggested we had opportunity to find and capture him before but we didn't take advantage of it. Well, the Afghans actually said, we know where he is. We can give him to you. We'll put him out in another country and you can go get him with, I hate to say this, but sometimes American arrogance trumps the things that are in front of you to take advantage of. And we didn't really, we're so arrogant. We said, we'll get him on our own. We don't need your help. And we could have ended this conflict 19 years ago. So one of the other things that comes to mind, Tim, is that we now have to pass through TSA and that flying is a whole different experience. Sure is. And not only here, but around the world. The world has changed because of that. And when you think back to the good old days of coming to Hawaii and having somebody in a hula skirt offer you pineapple juice until you burst, those days are over. I mean, it affected all kinds of travel issues and still does, although COVID has had another effect. But I feel that the travel issue is at the superficial level because there are all kinds of other things that have changed in our world since 9-11. There's a distrust, there's a racism. There's an opportunistic and dictatorial leaders that have come up. And somehow, if you take my point, that 9-11 that has changed everything and that the world would be and is different and you start examining the world beyond TSA, the world beyond TSA, you find that so many other things have changed and not for the better. I think one of the things I would add to that is that, you would think as a matter of learning a lesson that the US would recognize how important it is to be global leader and not turn its back on issues elsewhere, to try to impart the values of democracy and morality everywhere. But somewhere along the line, and it was not just the leaders, it was the people, we turned isolationistic. And I think the isolationism comes from 9-11. Let's just turn our back on this, it's so unpleasant. And if they do it again, we'll meet them at the past. We'll go out and search them and hunt them and destroy them. But we forgot about the real lesson and that it's that Thomas Friedman world is flat. We're all in this together, we all have to cooperate, including countries that have different ideologies. And it seems to me that we've really lost touch with that. And so instead of 9-11 making us recognize a global role, it had just the opposite effect. I could even add to that, Jay, and say that it's made us isolationists within our own country. 9-11 was the greatest moment for all Americans to come together as one. And like you said, we've lost that in 20 years. But I guess in my mind, I think, if you could take politics out of the subject, out of any conversation, those who I disagree with, I'd probably like to go out and have a beer with them, go fishing with them, and maybe play a little poker with them. But once the conversation and their isolationism and our polarization comes from our political beliefs, which we all seem to have to talk about it, there goes the problem. And somehow, some way, we've got to be able to argue and disagree with one another as Obama would say, without being disagreeable. And the greatest tragedy of 9-11 is what's transpired in 20 years that we have become polarized, we've become isolationists with our own country. And I'd like to see Americans come back together. And whether it be over COVID or not, whether it be over abortion issues or not, immigration or not, let's identify the policies and keep them as policies that we disagree on, but let's keep the personalities out of it. And the second we can do that, we may come back together again where both sides of the aisles of Congress can talk to one another and go to lunch with one another. Hell, have a cocktail with one another, rather than scratch each other's eyes out in front of the cameras every day, every week. That's my eternal hope. Yeah, smart power, soft power, right here at home among constituent groups right here at home. I wanna add a point though that you made me think of and it's this, the cell phone, the modern smartphone was only introduced in I think 2008 by Apple. And until that time, we didn't really have social media to speak of, we didn't have all the power of the smartphone. And people were more in touch personally, but somewhere along the line, when the smartphone and social media were introduced, somehow I think the environment set up by 9-11 made us welcome those things. We didn't really have to get out there with strangers and we could learn from the internet and from the smartphone and engage that way and we didn't have to take any risks. So that became our way of doing business together, of connecting with each other through electronics, more than, much more than before. And I think that has had a huge effect. I think that was somehow a ripe possibility because of 9-11, but I think it really took off after, everybody knows it really took off after 2008 when the phones became available. And this has changed the way we communicate in this country. It has changed the way we do media that we distribute information and news. It has changed credibility of sources. It has changed information to misinformation and disinformation. It has changed the social compact where we respect each other and have a kind of an assumption of credibility with each other. And I think our society has really, really changed over the last 20 years. And when you take into account the fact that a lot of people in the demographic were not born then, not only here, but everywhere. I mean, what are they saying that in Afghanistan, most of the people in Afghanistan didn't exist at the time of 9-11. They weren't born yet, but that's so in many places in the world. And so people in general, don't have the kind of memories that you and I have. They don't see the lessons. They don't connect the dots from 9-11 till now. Their lives have nothing to do with 9-11. So I guess I wonder what you think about what the average person who wasn't even born yet or who was very young at 9-11 thinks about it now today. How important is it? How important are its lessons? Or are they of no consequence? Oh, you don't ask easy questions at all. My answer would say it depends on how they value history and the effects of history to the present and the effects of history to the future. And if they understand the value of history, then they say, I understand the value of 9-11 and the lessons to be learned from that. We look at, I wasn't around for the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I certainly realized the lessons that were involved in that. And that was letting your guard down and not looking at the signals and not looking at the points of data that were being reported in different agencies, but they were being missed. Not unlike the history lessons of 9-11, as far as security and learning the lessons of security and data and information and consolidating it so it doesn't fall through the cracks, but also the social issues. I mean, no greater event brought Americans together than Pearl Harbor, as did 9-11. And if you could see what brings us together, what commonalities we have as a nation, as a people and focus on the commonalities of what we believe in and what we hold value to versus then and focus and emphasize and amplify our differences. There's hope for us. There's hope for this democracy, for this nation. And whether you were born in 9-11 or not is irrelevant to recognizing that which we have in common as fellow Americans and the bright future that we can forge together if we choose to forge together. Yeah, and you know, the end of our engagement in Afghanistan is kind of closing the book in a way on what happened in 9-11. It's kind of now, if you look forward, done with that chapter, we only have to close one time, about two by the way, but we can look forward to a better time, a time of better thinking, a time of better cohesion. So at the end of our show, which I think is really special, and thank you for joining me in this discussion, this reverie, I would like to play that same graphic that we started with and offer at least a few seconds of silence in memorial. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Jay. And for everyone that looks at 9-11 with a broken heart, my heart goes out to you. The same. Aloha. Aloha.