Wednesday
Night Blog #6
September
10, 2014
By
Tom
DiCaprio
I am
going to begin this blog by getting the obvious out of the way. Tomorrow is the thirteenth anniversary of the
September 11, 2001 attacks. Yes, the
world changed forever as a result of the attacks that resulted in the War on
Terror. Until then such an attack would
only occur in a novel that authors such as Tom Clancy would write. He wrote about a hijacked plane that was used
as a missile that would crash into a building in his 1994 novel Debt of Honor. Since then countless authors, myself
included would write about the next catastrophic terrorist attack. Hopefully such an attack will never occur,
however with the rise of ISIS we cannot afford to put down our guard especially
now. That alone would be a grave
mistake. ISIS is the biggest threat
facing the United States along with al-Qaeda when it comes to terrorism. Despite this, Fareed Zakaria brought up
something the other day in which Osama bin Laden said before his death that he
ordered al-Qaeda members to create fake terror groups that were actually al-Qaeda
itself in order to throw off the United States and our allies. Oliver North mentioned in a Facebook post
that I read where he mentioned various terrorist groups and their leaders
fighting the U.S. and our allies whether it be together or separately. Well all I have to say is that we cannot rule
out the possibility that they are in fact working together as one al-Qaeda
unit, but are pretending to be separate terrorist groups in order to throw us
off and then they would come together and the War on Terror proceeds to take a
disasterous turn for the worse since they played us like a game of chess (yes a
Fugees lyric reworded and paraphrased in the process).
As for
9/11, it began the road that would result in my transition from an aspiring
mystery novelist who dreamed of writing a spy novel but didn’t think I could do
it to a three time published spy/political thriller novelist. After Wolf Blitzer discussed a scenario of a
dirty bomb attack at a presidential inaugural in January 2005, I began to believe
that I could actually write a Tom Clancy-esque spy novel after all. The rest is now history.
A week
ago tonight I read a Facebook post by a friend of mine which said that a Rochester,
NY police officer was shot. Little did I
know how monumental the story would become in the Rochester, New York area
where I live. The next morning I was
listening to the radio when it was announced that the officer who was shot was
the first Rochester Police Department officer to be killed while on duty since
1959 and that the suspect who killed the officer was shot as well as an
innocent bystander. That alone is very
sad, but it was what happened next that would give this an even greater
meaning. The officer had left behind a
wife and two children. The suspect in
the shooting had been recently paroled and for the second time in as many weeks
that a slip up in the parole check in system resulted in a very violent
crime. The first crime as a result in
the incompetence of the parole system was the rape of a teenage girl. If the Rochester community was already
outraged as it was, then more communities especially nearby East Rochester, New
York (where I live) became further outraged when the name of the officer was
released. A friend of mine mentioned on
Facebook that her cousin was the officer who was killed without releasing his
name. The moment I read on Facebook that
the officer who was killed was Daryl Pierson, it hit home for me. I knew Daryl and his family. His mom and my mom were very close friends
when they were co-workers at Wegmans Food Markets. I had been among a group of friends who attended
a gathering at Daryl’s home a couple of years earlier. He was working that evening. Why do these kind of tragedies happen to good
people. Daryl had returned to work a day
earlier after being on medical leave for eight months and his son’s first day of
kindergarten took place on the day that he was killed. Thousands of people attended the wake as well
as the funeral. I had never been to a
police or military wake and I hope that such a tragedy never grips Rochester,
New York or its surrounding communities.
I gained a greater appreciation of law enforcement and what they have to
endure on a daily basis. I was even more
amazed by how the Rochester area came together.
This gives community a whole new meaning.
With that
I will be closing this blog until next week.
Until then take care.
