Nineteen Years After

I was in a campus computer lab, studying interrupts. Didn’t find out until hours later, when I was wondering why it was so oddly quiet – couldn’t hear any airplanes.

I distinctly recall that my first reaction when I found out about the Towers was shock. “What? Why?”

I spent years researching in my free time for “why”, because nothing on the news sounded right. The events I’d seen just… didn’t match what the mainstream media stated as “must be the cause”. Worse, they didn’t fit what I knew about human nature.

(I grant you I have a darker view of human nature than most people. You grow up around Cluster B personality disordered types, that happens.)

What it did seem to fit was what I remembered about the Middle East from Airwolf – yes, I was old enough to see the original TV run. So I got my hands on the eps again.

…The difference in how Hollywood portrays the area and culture between the early 80s and 2000 on is stark. And you don’t just see it in Airwolf. The Rockford Files had at least a few eps dealing with oil sheikhs and their various disregard for the law, etc.

I honestly wonder what happened between the 80s and now that Hollywood lost so much touch with reality.

Which is a long and roundabout way of saying today hurts, September 11th will always hurt. And part of that hurt, for me, is the feeling we were betrayed (and continue to be betrayed) by our own mainstream media storytellers. Hollywood decided the world was a more lucrative market than just the U.S., and shaped their stories to appeal to audiences… some of whom, too many of whom, are lethally hostile to this country.

I’d call it biting the hand that feeds, but Hollywood seems to think there will always be more hands out there.

I’ll never be able to take more than a support role; too much damage, taken over too long. But I can write honestly; about what I see, about what Evil is, about what good people are willing to do to stop it.

So I will.

Galaxies.