I was returning from an early morning run on Tuesday morning, September 11.

I looked at my watch just to check how long I had been gone to make sure I didn’t wimp out and cut it short because I was short of breath. 

The time was 8:45 a.m. I felt good because I had actually gone five minutes longer.

It was a perfect day.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the air was crisp and clean, the water along the East River on the Queens side was smooth. 

My thoughts were of the hours and day ahead of me.  It included some additional exercise ... that of my constitutional rights in the primary and then of my journalistic skills. 

I wasn’t happy at all about having to go to the Office of Emergency Management bunker. 

There officials were supposed to be monitoring voter fraud, but it seemed there was confusion about whether it would be open or not, functioning as the clearing house or not. 

I perceived the assignment as a tenth string one and dreaded having to fight my way to Lower Manhattan and into the World Trade Center where the multi-million dollar so called ‘terrorist proof’ complex was built.

I heard a noise but thought nothing of it, since trucks constantly created bumping, popping sounds so thus I continued my chat with a building supervisor where I live. 

Our conversation was interrupted by the screams of someone who yelled from their balcony “The World Trade Center has been bombed, terrorists have bombed the towers”. 

I was in disbelief but I jumped over the rail to run upstairs to find a TV set.

As I turned the corner I saw WTC tower number one on fire, I knew instantly that my job assignment would change though I didn’t know to what magnitude. 

As I continued to stare I saw a black dot begin to grow in size on the screen. It was too fast to be a helicopter.  The realization of what it was exploded in my mind at virtually the same time the 757 crashed into the second building. 

My instincts took over and I knew I had to get to my job, which I did. 

After throwing three sets of clothes in my vehicle, I bullied my way over the Queensboro Bridge which at the time was virtually empty. 

There are a few defining, book mark moments in everyone’s own personal story, the next look over my left would be one of mine.

Under a blue sky I would see the two symbols of my hometown, two icons that were on any portrait I’d ever hung on any wall, burning like Roman candles. 

The smoke trail blew to the north and I had to look away to keep from becoming some side casualty.  I didn’t know then, that would be the last time I would see the twin towers etched on the horizion.  I would hear on the radio later that both collapsed after the intense fire and impact would weaken what I once viewed as an invincible expression of man’s architectural marvel.

When the day began this was a divided city. 

People carrying prejudices with them of political, religious, and ethnic natures into the voting booths — the tally of which was set to decide the new direction of our city. 

By the end of the day, we were a city and nation united in shock, pain and anger. 

I venture to say that with potentially ten thousand people in those buildings when they collapsed, almost every person in this town will attend a funeral in the next few weeks. I myself will be at three, though I am grateful that I won’t be at more and people won’t be at mine. 

If this act were carried out a few hours later, these words you read now would not exist.

I am a person who has seen quite a bit in my short time on earth, but for me even the war in Kosovo, pales to this. 

I have never felt insecure about being an American or a New Yorker, but hearing the voice of my mother and children in hysteria when I finally decided to call, made me feel more at risk here than when I was in the Balkans. 

I am angry about that feeling that way. I am angry that this group of madmen who pulled this thought from the darkest reaches of their minds to do this.

Politics always has more than one side and certainly more than one means to the end. 

The attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the crash of a fourth plane is a means to only one thing — war.

That was the thought I had in my head. 

I was raised to turn the other cheek and to forgive. 

I am angry that this act has further robbed me of those notions. 

Seeing Palestinian children chanting in the streets further intensified my furnace of anger. Although I am not a cheerleader for Israel, I have no problems with what ever they do now to defend themselves. 

I hope that our Government will defend us and not just talk about it like it has so many times before. 

The day after a twenty-something-year-old kid said to me “oh this is all just war propaganda”. 

Giving what he said the weight that any comment like that from a 20-year-old deserves, I thought about it again.

This isn’t something any true human being would sanction—Christian, Jew, Catholic or Islamic.

Let’s find the disease wherever it is and sterilize it like you would any cancer — vigorously, and with extreme prejudice.