I remember certain aspects of the day quite clearly. It was a Tuesday morning and I was running a little late for work (as usual) at the Center for Crime Victim and Sexual Assault Services in Ithaca, NY.

Ithaca is about a four hour drive from NYC, depending on which route you take. But I grew up in New Jersey about an hour's drive from the city. It was an ever-present piece of anyone who grew up in the greater tri-state area.

When I got to work a little before 9 AM, I logged onto the internet as I did every morning. The Center only had dial-up, and I'd often tie up the phone lines checking e-mail or doing research.

I tried loading the MSNBC.com homepage that morning and it just wouldn't load. I tried the CNN.com homepage and after hitting the refresh button a few times, it finally came up. The picture of the plane-shaped hole in the first tower that was hit.

I remember thinking that it must have been a small plane because the hole wasn't as wide as the building. I thought it was an accident, that a small prop plane had lost control and gone tragically off course. I had no idea it was something much more sinister.

Around that time our therapist Kathy received a phone call from her husband telling her that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center and nobody was sure what was happening. He called back to tell us that the second plane had hit.

I remember going with our receptionist Tina to visit her husband that morning. He was a paramedic in Ithaca and we went to their squad office because they had a big screen TV. That's the first time that either Tina or I saw what happened in vivid detail. CNN just kept rerunning the second impact. Every broadcast of it was just as traumatic as the one before.

From there we went back to the office badly shaken. We had more details at that point, about the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crashes, and a palpable fear set in. Kathy's dad was a government official and our boss Kate's father was on vacation in D.C. Neither of my colleagues could reach their respective fathers by phone.

We closed the office early, took the crisis line pagers with us and went to Kathy's house to follow the coverage on her TV. Most of us went home a few hours later, feeling pretty raw and vulnerable.

I remember very clearly spending the next few weeks feeling lost and deeply traumatized. Tina's husband, along with his Ithaca EMS colleagues, were almost dispatched to NYC. We were informed by the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault that our services as crisis advocates might be needed in the city. Our services were never activated though. That may have been a good thing, since I was having a hard time with just the images myself.

It was weird looking up in the sky and not seeing any planes or their contrails, which were a familiar sight in the autumn skies over upstate New York. There were calls across the internet for candlelight vigils within a couple of weeks after the attacks. One was to be held at the Muller Chapel Pond on the Ithaca College campus. I felt overwhelmingly compelled to go be in a place where I felt safe and to be surrounded by those who were as deeply impacted by the tragedy as I was.

There were only three of us who showed up at the pond: me, my friend Tara and her girlfriend at the time. Tara brought the candles and the three of us lit them and stood staring into the pond and sharing our grief. It was cathartic despite our small number.

I never felt comforted by President Bush's "we're gonna get 'em" speechifying. I knew even then that he would cynically use this traumatic tragedy for his own selfish political gain. I was one of the 10% who still didn't approve of him even in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

National tragedy shouldn't buy anyone automatic support, respect or admiration. All those must be earned, and I can at least feel validated four years later that most of the country is finally coming around to seeing what I've seen all along.

I had many friends living in the city at the time and feared for their lives. But they thankfully survived and still didn't support the Iraq invasion or nearly any part of Bush's domestic agenda. The direct survivors do not need lectures about what September 11th means or about the threat of terrorism. We lived it, thankyouverymuch.

Now that I'm an Arizona resident, I feel I have a little more credibility and investment in talking about 9/11 than most of my neighbors. I find it more than a little silly to see "Remember September 11th" bumper stickers on cars with Arizona license plates. It's a nice sentiment, but Arizona was not attacked. Frankly, I don't need to be told to remember that day; that day will forever be indelibly etched in my mind.

Yes, it was a horrific national disaster that could have been avoided if our leaders weren't asleep at the wheel (or on vacation, as the case may be), but no, it wasn't valid justification to cut taxes for the wealthy, to invade Iraq, to destroy Social Security, to evicerate our emergency management service, or to destroy the enviroment, among many other travesties.