September 11 - 8 Years later - Remembering Melissa C. Doi

September 11, 2001 happened eight years ago today.

What has changed and what has not?

I could write an essay on that subject.

But instead I would like to remember a life, a life cut short by terrorist thugs, who wished to make a political statement, who washed to commit jihad against America. Who wished to kill.

Today I remember the life of  Melissa C. Doi. Who was born into this world on September. 1, 1969 and perished on that God-awful September 11 2001 day.  She was only 32.

Here is what the New York Times wrote about her in 2002:

Beneath Melissa C. Doi’s crisp Wall Street veneer beat the ebullient heart of a ballerina. Had her physique cooperated, Ms. Doi often said, she would have become a professional ballet dancer.

Instead, she followed her heart along a winding path of professional exploration. At Northwestern University she studied engineering, then switched to sociology. After graduation she took a job in public relations, then moved to banking. Four years ago she joined IQ Financial Systems, which develops financial software, and quickly became a manager.

She danced through it all. “She would get happy and just dance,” said Lara Beth Metzger, a friend and former classmate. “Salsa, kick lines, everything.”

Ms. Doi, 32, was an original thinker who questioned almost everything. “Whenever we had a staff meeting you could count on Melissa to ask the first question,” said Eyal Altaras, her supervisor at IQ Financial.

Ms. Doi was especially close to her mother, Evelyn Alderete, and bought her a condo in the Bronx where they lived together. They were supposed to leave for a vacation in Italy on Sept. 14. “She could be a little pain in the neck,” Ms. Alderete said. “But she was the best daughter anyone could have.”

Here is one the now-defunct New York Sun Wrote about the 911 call and her:

Thousands of New Yorkers yesterday retreated to the privacy of their offices, studies, or bedrooms to click onto the Internet and listen to the last words of a woman they never met. They were the words of Melissa Doi, who was trapped on the 83rd floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center when, at 9:17 a.m. on September 11, 2001, she reached a 911 emergency operator. Doi’s was the only civilian voice heard in the batch of 911 tapes released yesterday. Her pleas were made public because her voice had already been introduced as evidence in the trial earlier this year of Zacarias Moussaoui. Yesterday, her voice testified to something else — to the way in which the unique spirit of New Yorkers allowed glimmers of light to shine through even on that darkest of sunny summer days.

The written transcript is wrenching, the tape difficult to listen to more than once. “Are they going to be able to get somebody up here?” Doi asks. “Of course, ma’am. We’re coming up for you,” the female operator replies. Later on, as smoke thickens at Doi’s location, her desperation rises. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” she says. “No, no, no, no, no,” the operator says. “Ma’am, say your prayers. You’ve got to think positive because you’ve got to help people get off the floor.” Melissa Doi’s words are heard only for about four minutes of the 24-minute tape.”Ma’am, stay calm,” the operator gently repeats again and again as she tries to comfort Doi, even as her words are met only with a chilling silence on the other end of the line.

Doi had marked her 32nd birthday less than two weeks before that morning. She was a manager at IQ Financial Systems. Friends writing on September 11 memorial Web sites paint a picture of a woman of spirit and kind heart. One former co-worker described her as “the type of person you never forget,” with an infectious smile and never in a bad mood. A friend from grade school wrote that Doi was “always so sweet and beautiful.”

The operator, meantime, has not been identified. Thus, New Yorkers know her, for now at least, only for her consoling voice even amidst her professionalism — as she’s heard comforting Doi, she’s coolly collecting information that might have helped rescuers had the damage not been so great as to preclude any rescue. We may never know whether these two women encountered each other before that single phone call; in a city this size, the odds are against it. But the operator was New York at its best, both compassionate and pragmatic, and unwilling to give up so long as there was any hope onto which to hold.

Five years on, New Yorkers still catch themselves longing for the firefighters to arrive on the 83rd floor, hardly willing to accept that what help might have arrived ultimately was in vain. Doi’s voice tolls out as a reminder of the human tragedy of that day. Yet the tape is more than that. It is also a reminder that even on September 11, the city’s darkest day, as airplanes flew into buildings and fields and as Lower Manhattan was blanketed with the clouds of a new war, one New Yorker was there to reach out to another. The tape is a reminder that the terrorists succeeded in breaking the city’s buildings and taking lives, but not in robbing New York of its humanity.

Now for some thoughts of my very own….

September 11, 2001 was a moment when the world changed forever.  Like on December 7, 1941, the Nation came together as one, on that fateful day.  Politics did not seem to matter it was all about America.  I, at the time, was unemployed.  I remember where I was the minute the first plane went into the Trade Center; I was sitting on my front porch, drinking coffee with my Dad.  I had come in to get a refill, when Mom said that a plane had crashed into a building in New York.  I, being the newshound that I am, went and got more coffee and then headed to the TV in my room to watch it all unfold.  I was never was scared, until I learned that a plane was headed for the White House.  The plane that would later be identified as flight 93 that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.  That was a fear that I hope I never have to experience again.

Politics, they say, has no place in a memorial like this.  Well, I happen to disagree with that.  We Conservatives happen to know that politics and  the war on terror are all intertwined.  The Liberals or as I like to call them; Socialist Democrats are another story; half of them believe that George W. Bush ordered or at least orchestrated the attacks.  The other half of liberal Democrats think that America is an imperialistic Nation and got exactly what was coming to it.  That is the difference.  The battle lines are drawn; which side do you stand on?  There are two sides, Socialist Anti-American Liberal and American-Loving Conservative.  You cannot have it both ways.  Pick one, please.

The terrorists that struck on 9/11 and killed Melissa and the other 2,995 victims; did not do so, because of our foreign policy, which is what the Socialistic Democrats say and also the Libertarians and the Racist and Anti-Semitic Paleo-Conservatives, like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan say.  Rather they attacked us because we are free.  They attacked us because of our Judea-Christian values; they attacked us because of our free capitalistic system.  That whole foreign policy argument is a straw man argument of the isolationists, who oppose America protecting its interests overseas.  That is because they harbor much of the hatred of America, like the liberals, but for very different reasons.  The Paleo-Conservative movement is one that is steeped in Racism, Anti-Semitic beliefs; these are the same people, whom opposed FDR’s going to Germany to fight against Hitler.  In fact, Pat Buchanan wrote a book called “The Unnecessary War.”

Let me give my readers some sobering words of reality.  If we bow out of this war on terror, before the mission is completed, Al-Qaeda is destroyed, and the war on terror is won.  Melissa’s death and everyone else who died in those World Trade Center buildings, In the Pentagon, in that field in Pennsylvania, will have died in vain, because we the American people lost our will to fight.  George W. Bush and his administration, for all their shortcomings, knew the stakes in this game of war against a terrorist organization were quite high.  Bush counted the cost and paid for it with his own Presidency.

The question is now, will the Barack Obama Administration be willing to count the cost and continue to fight, or will he kowtow down to the Liberal Socialistic Democratic Left and lose his will to fight and allow the United States to hang its head in defeat?  If the Obama Administration does this, it would mean that 2,996 people went to their graves, for nothing.

May God Bless America and May he keep our American Soldiers in his mighty hand.

May Melissa Doi rest in the eternal peace of the Almighty God in Heaven.

…and may we never, ever, forget.

We stand with the 2,996 always - May you never be forgotten!

Project 2,996 website

Update: Others Remember: Roundup at Memeorandum here, and Here and here

Update #3ALFONZO RACHEL shares my feelings about liberals and 9/11; and also slam dunks the 9/11 truther crowds.