I still remember September 11th, listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy NOW on WRPI on that clear September day many years ago.

Democracy NOW was followed by Nation Magazine, read by the late Rezin Adam’s every day. The Uber-activist, Albany’s Jane Jacobs. I got to know her towards the end from Save Pine Bush. Ms. Adams, as Erastus Corning addressed in an earlier era, took the bus from Albany to Troy and would read them on radio from The Nation Magazine and other progressive publications from 10 AM to noon day, five days a week. I was always so bummed out when she couldn’t make it, and they played whatever that crap music the college radio station played. 1994 Plymouth Sundance! HVCC! Those were the days.

I met Amy Goodman some years later at Sanctuary for Independent Media. She is very short, for her statue on New York City radio. After all these years, it seems hard to believe she is still is doing her program. The Democracy NOW studios were a few blocks from the World Trade Center, I believe you can hear on the tape archives the building rumble as they collapsed.

I never had a warm embrace for New York City, the big honky, commercial, money-dripping and obnoxious, dirty trash filled city that had recently closed it’s landfill and was trucking it’s garbage upstate while ending it’s recycling program. Especially when us rural upstaters burned ours out back, and saved the cans and bottles for recycling. We put the compost and manure back in the earth, the paper and plastic became carbon which fed the earth. And other stuff became backfill on the farm and homestead.

If anything at the time, I saw September 11th as primarily an excuse for blovating cops and their enablers, right-wing politicians to expand their operations and snare more people just trying to go through their every day life. A lot of wearing the flag lapel on suits and cheap flag decals on sale at K-Mart. Tough looking guys standing at urban public buildings, supposedly to deter terrorists and preform security theater, but mostly to harass every citizens as they went on their business. And to target and harass those who dare criticize the politicans in this day of national unity.

I didn’t follow the 2000 election that closely, as it was before I decided to study Political Science. But I didn’t love George Bush by any means, and I hated how September 11th became a reason to support the President. How dare he exploit some kind of national tragedy to enhance his powers? I wrote my Congressman, the very conservative Democrat Mike McNulty, a Vietnam or Korean War Veteran from the still very conservative former mill city of Green Island, where all the cops and firefighters live – and he responsed back with a letter that said something like “at times like this, we have a national duty to support our President”. He stuck around for a few more terms, but sensing the times were turning against conservatives in 2006, and probably didn’t want to loose in a primary to a liberal like Phil Steck, he tossed in his hat.

Truth is I never got patriotism. There are many good Americans, good people who work hard whether it’s in the public or private sector. And I’m sure September 11th was a tragedy to all those who lost loved ones. But hardly did I fall in love with New York City, the culture of greed and corporate power or the big World Trade Center towers they represented. Plastic that toxic stuff that stinks when you burn it, gloss, fakery, wokeness, was all the World Trade Center ever represented in my mind. So far from the woods and pasture lands of Upstate New York. Or that rural town of Greenville that I grew up in.