September 11, 911, Two Years

Two years ago today, September 10 2001, I stepped from a 'plane at San Francisco airport after a week long conference in Indianapolis. We had just launched the technology we had spent the previous three years working on. I was tired but excited, the economy was in a frump but I had faith that we could pull out of it, there were signs of an up, not many, but they were there. I collapsed in my apartment, in Sunnyvale, uncertain but happy that we were finally getting the word out there.

I awoke early in the morning, as was my habit I turned on the TV - I liked to watch CNNFN before I left for the office. I wasn't in a hurry.

To my surprise the first channel I tuned to was off air "Due to the incident in New York." I had no idea. I tuned to CNN. It was early still on the east coast, someone told a crazy story about an aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center. Terrible! No one could guess what the next 30 minutes would unfold. In terrifying disbelief I sat and witnessed the unthinkable. Another aircraft, as I watched, amazingly drove into the side of the building as the camera, and I, looked on. I felt helpless.

I know that those moments cannot have had the terror of being there physically, but I was there. I stood by, helpless, as another 'plane flew into the towers. I shook as I realized that this was no accident but some vile attack. I cried as those people jumped from the windows, no option but down, and certain death. No horror is greater than what happened next.

We had stayed at the towers just weeks before, in the Marriott there. A conference, economic uncertainty and optimism. Priscilla had gone shopping in the mall below those magnificent giants.

My son said, "Man, can you imagine what that would have looked like at night." His Hollywood production values shielded us for a moment in our innocence as we sought to protect our psyche from the horror of it. Despite the horror, the perpetrators hadn't thought all of the production values through. Somehow, for a moment, it seemed just a little less horrifying.

In the weeks that followed, I and many business men stood in defiance, we would not let those bastards change our plans, ruin our dreams. But despite the obvious nobility of it, we were wrong to continue. Two years later I feel the horror of it even more now than I did then, my business in a state as far from New York as you can get - along with the rest of California's Silicon Valley suffered what may be terminal damage. No more hitech toys. There are only a few more to layoff. Skilled engineers once earning three figures an hour are unemployed and have been for more than a year - the work now goes to China or India where local companies pay just one figure an hour for the same skills. Some of our guys are competing to work in Starbucks. We lost the momentum. We lost the initiative. We are no longer stars.

We fell. We fell to earth with a bump and we are sat squarely on our asses, bruised and bleeding equity. No one wants an innovator unless he or she can trace Bin Laden ... a cause that any of us here would serve ... despite our idealism and passivism, even though we know a new world war is upon us and we only have to awaken to see it.

It takes time to heal but the worse may be yet to come. Despite the media and government promise the empty buildings that have increased in number over the past two years at an astonishing rate speak all that needs to be said. This isn't the ordinary ebb and flow that we have known these past few decades, this is different.

So ... what are we to do? Eighteen months ago my mantra was "Optimise for recovery" but I think most of us are beyond that now.

I have always been an idealist and confirmed passivist but I am also a student of history.

If a new world order is already upon us and a world war is here then there is nothing we can do or should do except accept that fact, start taking sides and get on with it ... fight for the preservation of freedom and the pursuit of happiness just as those before us have ... route the enemy and win.

This is not a war the governments or states can fight to win - this is not about the state - and we cannot make it a war about preserving them. This is a new war against individual freedom, a war that demands that each of us, wherever we are in the world, each free individual must fight the war, in whatever way we are presented it, to preserve freedom, to preserve life, to restore the pursuit of happiness.