Remembering 9/11
cc WTC 9/11, 2001 wikimedia Attribution: Robert J. Fisch
“They always wanted to get that building”
That was what I said when I first heard about 9/11 three or four days later.
I once had a job interview at Merrill Lynch in The World Financial Center which was connected to The World Trade Center by a sky bridge. My goal was to eventually work at WTC, but luckily I didn’t get that job and it was the only job interview I didn’t get an offer on. I continued working at Bayer Diagnostics and then resigned due to an animal rights ethics problem with a blood analyzer I was working on.
The short story of why I quit was that the human blood analyzer I was working on was headed for Phase II with an animal blood version. I just couldn’t stomach being a part of the animal laboratory testing industry. I gave six months notice so I could clean up some projects I had half finished and I was promised that I didn’t have to work on the Phase II project during those six months. Afterwards, I backpacked around the world for a year and a half and then ordained in Myanmar in early 2001. Nobody could dream of why I would change tracks like I did. They thought this was very strange… until 9/11 happened 7 months later.
During those times in Myanmar, we were so isolated, it took 3 or 4 days for the news to arrive at the monastery. As an American, a Myanmar monk was eager to tell me the news. Who knows what my life would be like if that Merrill Lynch pathway opened up for me on that day?
Although I was tucked away in a Buddhist monastery in the Myanmar forest, the phone started ringing back home at my parents house. Many people thought I had died because there was a famous computer programmer named Jeremy Glick who led the passengers against the hi-jackers. That story is below:
https://americanmonk.org/september-11-and-jeremy-glick/
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