At this time 25 years ago, I was milling around the house, getting breakfast, and thinking about my upcoming prairie dog murd3ring trip to Wyoming later in the week. In a little while I'd be turning on the TV to check out the weather for Medicine Bow, Wyoming, because the internet wasn't quite there yet, and that's how we did it. A little before 9:00 I turned on the TV and was shocked at what I saw; a plane had "accidentally" flown into one of the twin towers and smoke was pouring out of the giant hole in the side of the building. I probably hadn't been watching 5 minutes when I saw a jetliner fly into the second tower, and at that moment I knew that this was no accident. I had an idea that the world was about to change, but had no clue to the extent of it. First and foremost, the immediate cessation of air travel meant that a few hundred prairie dogs missed a meeting with my heavily customized AR-15, and got to live out their puny lives instead. We were allowed to fly again after a few days, but it was awful. Seeing soldiers in airports with M-16s was sort of cool, but the long waits and near strip-searches were not cool at all. Years before, I accidentally took a flight with an entire 50-round box of .22LR in my pocket, and now you couldn't get on a plane with a nail clipper! The terrorists who planned and executed this horrific act that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people, put a resolve into our nation that probably hadn't existed since Dec. 7, 1941...we were going to get the bastards who were responsible for this! In spite of how awful it was to travel by plane for the next couple of years, it was a nice time in the U.S. It seemed that our petty differences no longer mattered against the backdrop of a shadowy terror network that would, no doubt, strike again soon. We felt like a united country for a while, and I'm glad to have lived through it. A quarter century later we've done a lot and learned a lot, and things are currently pretty quiet on the terror front. We lost a lot of freedoms that are mostly back, and it's kind of nice to be trusted to fly with a nail clipper again. It's also nice to know that if some bastards ever try to take over an airliner with box cutters again, there'll be a competition between passengers to decide who gets to beat the perpetrators to d3ath. Rest in peace to the 2,606 people lost when the twin towers collapsed, and for the rest of us let's move forward, mindful of how lucky we are not to have met a similar tragedy.