May 11, 2005 - 11:54 p.m.
It's been a while since I've updated here, and for that I apologize. There are rules, you see. Rules that journalists adhere to that most other people don't. Or rules that journalists SHOULD adhere to. One of those rules says we don't share our opinions on the news of the day with the general public. And since this site is viewable by the general public, that has limited my entries of late.
But I like throwing caution to the wind, so I will.
Today in Washington, the Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Treasury and a few other buildings were evacuated when a pilot and his buddy inadvertently crossed into restricted airspace over the city.
When we turned on CNN, all we knew for about three or four minutes was that there was a plane headed our way. That's the same thing they told people on Sept. 11, when the flight that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania was missing. I was in Michigan then. Today was a little more real for me.
Secret Service agents and Capitol Police officers shouted at people to move faster. If you've never seen either of those branches of law enforcement under stress, it's quite a sight. And not a pretty one. Those people mean business, and seeing a typically calm agent or cop start spazzing out, waving his or arms and shouting, "Run! Run!" is enough to startle even the unflappable. I only saw it on TV, and I was a little shaken by it.
I was scared today, for the first time since I was a little boy. It only lasted three or four minutes, but it was a three or four minutes full of genuine ignorance about what would happen next. Ignorance and immediacy. I looked out the 11th floor windows of our offices today, two blocks north of The White House, and thought about what it would look like if a plane came down in the middle of the buildings, or worse, into one of the buildings.
It was the kind of fear that has immediacy to it. Not like, "Oh, crap, what's my professor going to say when I don't turn in my paper tomorrow?" More like, "Is some plane going to come whizzing around the corner of that building over there and plow into mine?"
And then, almost as suddenly as the threat was announced, it was gone. Two F-16s and a Blackhawk forced the pilot to turn around and land 40 miles north of the city.
Kudos, by the way, to the jet pilots and the chopper pilot who brought the plane down safely, as well as to the Secret Service agents and Capitol Police officers who did a kick-ass job keeping people on the ground out of what would have been harm's way. Every account I got during my reporting of the story today said that the police did amazing, professional and swift work.
I'm not going to lose sleep tonight or anything, and I certainly realize I was never in any real danger. At that moment, though, for just three or four minutes, I didn't know. I just didn't know.
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