Reflections on 9/11

It was September 6, 2001. I was visiting friends at the World Executive Buildings in Manhattan. The tall buildings with their majestic atriums and the two neighboring towers reaching up to the sky were a little intimidating even for me. I’d been there before these structures were built. We were all abuzz about derivatives and the coming explosion in finance as these innovative instruments were being applied to home mortgages. From there I went uptown to see a couple more masters of the universe. The problem I was trying to solve was how conservative managers of pension funds would be motivated to purchase a bond with a slightly higher yield carrying a much higher risk. I was interested because I could see applications for South Florida where I had lived for almost 30 years.

The conversation came down to a debate over salesmanship and packaging rather than substance, and I decided to pass on the idea. It wasn’t the only reason I was visiting New York or even the main reason — I had other business to attend. Now I look back at the tragedy that was unfolding as I had those meetings, the unspeakable horror of 19 men preparing to bring down the world trade center, the pentagon and who knows what else but for Flight 93 being brought down by the heroes of Flight 93. And the economic tragedy that was unfolding, as the titans of Wall Street continued down a path of self destruction that started in the 1960’s and was elaborately enhanced to the point where the world monetary supply would increase to 10 times the gross domestic product of all nations.

I knew I had changes ahead for myself because of personal choices, but I had no idea how different the world was about to become. It wasn’t just the World Trade Center that came down a few days later. It was our joy derived from being Americans. As anger turned to hate and hate turned to revenge and violence, we “attended to business” while “business” attended to itself. The referees left the field and the players had no external inhibitions about doing unthinkable things in the marketplace.

The long march toward destruction began in earnest with the loss of nearly three thousand lives in those great buildings, symbols of our eternal optimism. It continued with the relentless pursuit of the appearance of profit, perhaps borne out of the knowledge that if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time you could be vaporized by people you didn’t know and who didn’t even know you existed. So maybe we all lost our way trying to get what we could before the day of reckoning and hoping that day would come after we had made our money and left the scene.

After the unspeakable horror and tragedy to thousands of families on 9/11/01 carried out by cowards on reckless missions spurred by fantasies of eternal glory, we then turned on ourselves and nearly finished the job. As a society we didn’t look until it was too late as the attack of 9/11/01 mushroomed into an attack on no less than 20 million American households led by our own titans of Wall Street. Just as they said back in 2001, the masters of the universe used their unparalleled skills of sales and packaging to bring poison pills into those homes and resulted in bringing the world to its knees.

There isn’t any James Bond or Superman to save the day. We are the agents of change. We are the citizens of the United States of America and that means we are the boss. We are not enemies of each other — we are comrades in arms — just ask any soldier in the battlefield whether he cares about the politics of the man or woman fighting next to him. We may disagree on ideology, philosophy, politics and religion but we still agree on one thing — we ALL like to win.

The agent of change, that is you, as a citizen of this great nation, is charged with bringing government and corporations back into line with the ideals we all share in common no matter what our background or economic class — the survival and prosperity of our nation. The battles have begun, the fires are burning as the people, scarred, wounded, and mourning their losses stand up and fight for their lives, their homes and their country. If there is any better way to honor those who died in the name of freedom and free enterprise, it is to create our own enterprise to compete with the forces of institutions that seek to take our wealth, our hopes and dreams and make it their own through stealth. Let’s take it back and change the game the way the founders of our country meant it when they wrote our great Constitution of the United States of America.

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