Yesterday I went to the Flight 93 Memorial about 20 miles
outside of Somerset, PA near a town called Shanksville. It is actually run and
managed by U.S. Park Rangers as a National Memorial. This place marks the spot
where a United Airlines flight is supposed to have crash landed on 9-11 due to
a heroic struggle by passengers against terrorists who had hijacked it.
Forty-four passengers are said to have perished.
The memorial is built on land that had been filled-in after
having been strip-mined. The site, with its buildings and walkways, is
confusing. It seems meant to be
confusing. The eyes search the surrounding terrain for a central locus, yet
there is no exact place that draws your attention. I felt as if I were walking
into a lie, a deceiving bit of stagecraft. With tall, looming concrete walls on
both sides of its walkways and its “Tower of Voices,” the impression is of some
sort of occult, directing influence.
Over the years I had researched the many anomalies
associated with 9-11. I recalled hazy bits of info about Flight 93: the lack of
airplane crash debris, conflicting eyewitness statements, speculation that the
plane had been shot down on orders from then Vice-President Dick Cheney and
even some claim about there not even being a plane involved at all. Oh, and
what happened to the bodies? Were the whole airplane and its contents vaporized
by some new weapon—i.e., turned to dust as happened at the World Trade Center?
It was a riddle with a set of odd-ball facts that didn’t quite make sense and I
refused to be overtaken by grief and sympathy in the face of unanswered
questions to reasonable inquiry.
President Trump appeared here on the anniversary to pay
homage. I like and support President Trump, but this too had felt like political
posturing. It was odd, just like his hypocritical stance on Syria; a perplexing
neo-con-seeming foreign policy. Granted, political maneuvering can be tricky to
decipher. This only added to my overall leeriness.
I’m not psychic, but the place did not “feel” right. I felt
an overwhelming urge to leave shortly after strolling around a bit. And so I
soon did.
My cousin Patrick was with me. He was still hobbling around
with a walker from his knee replacement surgery. We traded his walker in for a
wheelchair. They were freely available, just as they are in airports. Pushing
him forward among the throngs that were there on this sunny last day of
September, somehow made me feel like the two of us were props on a movie set.
As we got back into our car and drove off I kept wondering
about the National Memorial aspect to this spectacle. I am naturally suspect of
the federal government. It must have been funded and built by federal funds and
is now a sort of federal reservation. That was creepy at the very least.
Whatever our currently corrupt federal government lays its hands on does not
bode well anymore for truth, justice and the American way.
A memorial to lost loved ones such as this is meant to
stir-up reverence for the dead. My problem, however, was that the place itself
seemed so dead it killed any reverence I might otherwise feel. We headed home
and I resolved to review the intelligence gathered by citizen investigators on
this incident. As far as I’m concerned, the true fate of Flight 93 comprises
one of a tri-partite set of events that happened on 9-11 that remains
unresolved.
No comments:
Post a Comment