September 11 Birthdays- Can a Date Be Cursed?: Drugwar.com

Can A Date Be Cursed?

By Preston Peet

September 9, 2002 (posted at DrugWar.com Sept. 11)

In the first 35 years of my life, the most significant date for me personally in history was of course my own birthday. A voracious reader from an early age, I would come across many incredible events in history that took place on my own special date. Though all dates have their own tragic scorecard, most relating to my own birthday seem extra momentous.

The earliest recorded event in history that may have taken place on my birthday, as claimed by Dr. Ernest L. Martin in his 1981 book, "The Birth of Christ Recalculated," was the birth of Christ himself. Dr. Martin alleged that by using celestial charts that corresponded to the approximate era of Christ, he put the famous birthday on the same day as mine, way back in 3BC. This assertion, while interesting and a bit amusing, is also more than a bit fantastical. And while various groups of people have committed grave evil and violence in the name of Christ, the actual birth has never been reported as anything but peaceful, even if it was in a manger. This cannot be said of most other, provable major historical events that fell on the same date.(1)

William Wallace, made familiar to a wide modern audience by Mel Gibson¹s portrayal of the Scotsman in the popular film Braveheart, defeated the English forces arrayed under the command of Sir John de Warrene, Earl of Surrey, and his chief tax collector, Hugh de Cressingham, at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, in 1297. Half of the English army was destroyed, including Cressingham, as were many of the under equipped yet temporarily victorious Scots. (2)

Statue on the William Wallace Monument
From Images of William Wallace

In 1709, French forces met combined forces of the Spanish and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Battle of Malplaquet. Stopping the allies' advance towards Paris though forced to retreat, the French managed to kill an estimated 20,000 enemy troops.(3)

The Stars and Stripes is claimed by some to have been first carried by Americans in the Battle of Brandywine, Pennsylvania, in 1777. Estimates put British dead and injured anywhere from 500 to 2000, and for the defeated Americans between 1200 to 1300 dead and wounded.(4) Alexander Hamilton, later killed by Aaron Burr in an infamous duel, became the first US Secretary of the Treasury in 1789.

Flag carried at the Battle of
Brandywine- US Postage Stamp

With the sole exception of Daniel Webster, US President John Tyler's entire cabinet resigned in 1841 because of a bank bill veto by Tyler.(5) In 1842, Mexican forces took San Antonio,Texas, then retreated with prisoners.

In 1850, Phineas T. Barnum brought the Swedish Nightingale, Jeny Lind, to New York City amidst great fanfare for her US premier at the Castle Garden Theatre. Lind, already a well known opera singer, became one of the United States' early pop stars.(6)

A mob of Paiute Indians and Mormon men set upon a wagon train of settlers at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in 1857, slaughtering an estimated 127 men, women and children on or about the same date as my birthday. This was up until the 20th Century the greatest mass killing of US citizens by other US citizens.(7) The groundbreaking ceremony at the Pentagon in 1941,(8) and the US First Army entering Germany in 1944, heralding the beginning of the end of the Nazi death machine, both fell on the same date as my later birth.(9)

Arguably less destructive events took place in 1953 when Dr. Charles Hufnagel managed to successfully replace a faulty aorta valve with a plastic one, and in 1954 when Lee Ann Meriwether, Miss California (and future Cat Woman on the Batman tv series), won the first televised Miss America Pageant.

Lee Ann Meriwether

The US Congress authorized the creation of the US Food Stamp program in 1959, insuring that poor Americans get at least a semblance of federal assistance in obtaining basic necessities, like eating.(10) On the creative side of things, the Beatles, one of my very favorite bands of all time, recorded Love Me Do in 1962, the very first Beatles' song ever released.(11)

Then in 1966, I was born to a young woman in Florida who neglected to note the father's name or anything else about him for that matter, then gave me up for adoption, starting me out on a path of misadventure and instability from the get-go, living up to my birthday date¹s more negative historical aspects.

In 1967 "The Carol Burnett Show" premiered, and in 1970, the final show of "Get Smart" aired. The following year Nikita Krushchev died at the age of 77 of a heart attack. There were 11 Israeli athletes taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics of 1972, which ended on my birthday. In 1973, as I was enjoying the earliest birthday party of which I have real memories, the US CIA assisted in the overthrow and assassination of Chilean President Salvador Allende. In 1974, the second longest baseball game in history, lasting 25 innings, was played between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets. The television show "Mork and Mindy" first introduced comedian Robin Williams to the US public in 1978.

Moving into the latter stages of the last century, as I was celebrating my nineteenth birthday while living as a boho expatriate in Paris in 1985, a US satellite passed through the tail of the Giacobini-Zinner comet, the first to gather data directly from a comet in space. In 1990, the first President Bush declared in his "Toward a New World Order" speech that day that "Saddam Hussein would fail" in his bid to annex Kuwait, despite Bush's later leaving Saddam to remain in power, thereby insuring that his son and our current President can now be urging yet more death and destruction against Saddam and the Iraqi people, distracting public attention from the much troubling questions about the current Bush administration and its ties to corporate greedheads.

George Herbert Walker Bush

In 1995, the US blues legend John Lee Hooker got himself a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1997, Scotland created its first independent Parliament after being united with England for 290 years, and in 1998 US Independent Council Kenneth Starr sent the US Congress a report accusing President Clinton of eleven offenses for which he could possibly be impeached.

I have always looked forward to my birthday, right up until last year. I share a birthday with a variety of luminaries, such as the author D.H. Lawrence, (1885), film director Brian DePalma, (1940), Ferdinand Marcos, former despot President of the Philippines (1913), Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, (1943), pop star Moby, (1965), and even share the exact same date of birth as Kyle Kushman, cultivation editor and fellow writer at High Times, (1966).

October 2002 High Times

But this year, as the day creeps closer, now less than 48 hours away as I sit here and type at 1:30 on a Monday morning, I find I am not looking forward to the day at all. I am filled with an unsettling feeling, almost a dread, finding myself at odd moments unexpectedly choked up and teary eyed. As I am turning 36, I would until last year have simply put it down to getting older, as I¹m reaching an age where am I no longer quite as excited about growing older, suddenly finding I want to hold on to my youth just a little while longer. A classic case of the birthday blues. But I strongly suspect that this is not the main reason for my distress.

My birthday plans were very simple last year. Instead of my normal routine of climbing out of bed at the crack of dawn and sitting down to work on waking up and answering my email, I was sleeping in without a care in the world, snuggled in under the sheets with the love of my life. The ridiculously obnoxious ringer on the phone in the living room jolted us from sleep. Crusty eyed and not quite awake, we were confused by the worried tone of my girlfriend's mother, who told our answering machine that she wanted us to call her right away as she was worried sick about us in the city. What in the hell is she talking about, I said to my girlfriend as I prepared to roll back over into sleep. She felt enough urgency to get up to replay the message. Passing the tv on the way to the phone, she clicked it on to check the temperature on local news channel NY1. The next second I was bolting for the living room in response to her piercing shriek.

"Oh my god, they got the World Trade Center."

Manhattan, September 11, 2001

Sure enough, though we didn't then know who the "them" who carried out such an insane and terrible attack were supposed to be, (nor have we in the public actually seen to this day a year later the proof laid out in detail that points to one man or group as responsible), looking out my window I could see a huge billowing cloud of dust and debris from what we later decided was the just that minute fallen Tower 2, and the torch in the sky that was what was left of Tower 1.

Trying to imagine a NYC skyline with only one WTC tower, thinking how odd it was going to be, I raced for the roof where I snapped a series of photos of the burning tower, then of the crumbling tower as the screaming of the other people watching events unfold from the roofs around me just south of Houston Street washed over me.

The Tower goes down

The fall of the building itself made no sound, or at least, not one that I recognized. While I couldn't see the jumping people who¹d been earlier trying to escape what I vividly and disturbingly imagine was either the flames or their pain or both, I could see flickering flames in individual windows. It was more than obvious from my vantage point that there was mass carnage there less than a mile from where I stood, that there had to be scores of people dead already, if not more.

The streets below my rooftop were filled to capacity with hoards of fleeing masses, all looking dazed, the massive numbers eerily quiet. All I could think about was all the people who had been wiped out, people who as they started their day of normal routines probably never imagined it was to be their very last day taking their last steps on Earth.

The whole thing was made even more surreal and shocking by the incredibly beautiful, blue cloudless sky, the perfect temperature, and the fact that September 11 was, and still is, my birthday.

Lower Manhattan obscured by debris,
the Towers are gone

I have said a number of times that I cancelled my birthday last year, that I got a free year at 34 out of the otherwise horror-show of a day, but I cannot find it in me now, as the date is nearly upon me, to make light of the day. As the airwaves and print media fill with endless September 11-centered stories, the "The Babies of 9-11", "America Remembers 9-11", and "This is Why We Are At War" programs, they all serve as reminders that as bad as some of the other events of September 11 have been throughout history, from here on out my birthday will be remembered around the world as the date of the most horrific mass killing of innocent civilians within US borders ever, with most of the destruction and death happening right in front of my own eyes.

Seeing the moves to profit politically off the heinous and murderous crimes seems yet more depressing and evil when I realize every year will be the same for some time to come, with repeated specials about the event as Bush and crew lead us careening on into their endless war on terrorism, on to more destruction, more hate, more despair and fear, and ever more killing.

I'm left wondering in my blacker, more irrational moments if a particular date can be cursed. I wonder as well if I¹ll ever really have another genuinely happy birthday on September 11, once a very happy day for me, but now dark and damaged.

References:

1- Biography of Dr. Ernest L. Martin
http://askelm.com/resources/biography.htm

2- The Battle of Sterling Bridge
http://www.lawbuzz.com/justice/braveheart/victory.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5443/stirlingbrig.htm

3- The Battle of Malplaquet
http://www.bartleby.com/65/ma/Malplaqu.html

4- The United States Flag/The Battle of Brandywine
http://www.va.gov/pubaff/celebAm/Flag.htm
http://www.ushistory.org/march/phila/brandywine.htm

5- History of the US Treasury
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/history/secretaries/tewing.html

6- Jeny Lind Premiers in NYC
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/sep11.html

7- Mountain Meadows Massacre
http://www.mazeministry.com/mormonism/mmmassacre/newmm/mm1.htm

8- Pentagon Facts and Figures
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pentagon/facts.html

9- WWII Timeline
http://www.worldwartwotimeline.com/

10- Food Stamps Authorized by Congress
http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/timeline/1951_2000.htm

11- Love Me Do
http://www.thebeatles.com/html/lovemedo/

More Information about September 11

Second Birthday in a Row Ruined by Terrorism
http://www.theonion.com/onion3833/second_birthday.html

Historical People and Events
http://www.aboutfamouspeople.com/article1221_2.html

On This Day
http://www.on-this-day.com/onthisday/thedays/alldays/sep11.htm

Pre-September 11 Reports of Terrorist Threats, Including References to the World Trade Center- Why Did It Take 8 Months?
http://www.drugwar.com/pprewtcwarnings.shtm

September 11 News
http://www.september11news.com/

9-11 News Tracker
http://www.researchbuzz.com/911/mtype/

September 11, 2001- Attack on America
http://www.truthusa.com/911.html

Unanswered Questions- Thinking For Ourselves
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/

September 11, 2001: No Surprise
http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/September11.html

One Year Later, Cover Up Continues in Venice, Florida
http://www.madcowprod.com/

The Complete 9-11 Timeline
http://208.187.163.46/completetimeline/

Sense and Nonsense about September 11
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0912-01.htm