posted September 29, 2001 05:12 PM         

I came to a realization this morning, listening to "This American Life" on NPR. There were stories of war, past and present, and interviews with people on the road whether they were "ready for war." One woman broke down and started crying, saying that her nephew, who she raised as a son, is a marine paratrooper. He had called her to say goodbye, since he figured he had a good chance of not surviving if he got dropped in. They talked about the Viking concepts of berzerkers and "fey," comparing them to experiences in WWII. Fey means a sort of zombie-like walking through life, having seen the horrors of war, being half-dead, not caring whether you live or die. And how at the end of WWII, as people celebrated in the streets, they didn't proclaim "we have destroyed our enemies" or even "we won! we won!" but simply declared with relief, "it's over, the war is over." And I just lost it.

That's when I realized just how hard the events of September 11 had hit me. Even though they were just, for me, images on a television, thousands of miles away, it was if it had been my own family. I'm sure thousands, if not millions of us, felt exactly the same way. There I was, sitting in a hotel room in New Orleans, talking with my mother on the telephone, assuring her I was allright, with the t.v. on mute in the background. Then they showed some tape of one of the people who had jumped from the tops of the towers in desparation, following the body down, down, down, tumbling over and over as it seemed to float 100 stories down to a gruesome end. I broke off in the middle of the conversation, muttered "oh, God," and nearly broke down right there. That image will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Then, immediately, I stuffed it all inside and put on a steely front. I didn't want myself to be able to feel the horror and pain. I haven't been callous, or dismissive, or completely unfeeling. I cried the ocassional tear and put up my flag and sent in the check to the Red Cross. But that wall was still there, holding back the flood. But sometimes it feels like the dam is about to burst.

I think the the worst part is that this is just the latest in an undending string of events which demonstrates man's terrible power to commit evil against his fellow man, since the beginning of time. After listening to the radio this morning, I got out my copy of Maus again and thumbed through it, thinking of the millions who died in the camps. The Khmer Rouge killing fields. Hiroshima. The Crusades. The list goes on and on and on in my mind. Somewhere, tonight, in my city, someone will be killed over a $10 bag of drugs, and it won't even be considered important enough to make the local news. And I just feel like I don't know what to do.

One part of me feels like I want to be a little child again, feel the arm embrace of my mother's arms, and have her whisper in my ear "Hush, hush, little one. Don't you cry. Everything's going to be allright." I want to hug everyone I see walking down the street. The other part of me wants to shake an angry fist at the sky, proclaim my rage against an uncaring and unfeeling universe, where your life can be snuffed out in a cloud of exploding jet fuel just for going to work and trying to get by in the day-to-day world. I start getting rather Nietzschean.

Then, the most depressing sensation of all. I keep thinking, "what's the fucking point of all this?" We get up, get dressed, go on our merry ways, make cute little jokes with our friends or coworkers, maybe spend some time with our families and loved ones if we are lucky, just to go to bed to get up and go do it all over again. After a little while, we'll all be gone, and the Earth will continue to revolve around the sun, with the Universe not even noticing the few brief moments we were here. This is then offset by a completely separate voice in my head. "Listen, you whiney little shit," it says, "what are you complaining about? You've got it better off than 95% of humanity. You've got a place to live, clothes on your back, food to eat, all the toys you want."

At the end of the day, as I lie awake in bed, what I think I want most is to hold someone and be held. To tell and be told that life is precious, and to make each second count. To love and be loved. So tonight hug the ones you love and tell them that it is going to "be allright."

posted September 29, 2001 05:45 PM            

I, too, have been writing a lot recently. I wrote something sort of stream-of-conscious-ly last night which is too big to go here (it may go into a book or something if I ever get around to writing one), but the gist of it was this.

A human being is like a pearl. It is a spark of pure love, surrounded by layer upon layer of complex gunk and sediment, obscuring this core. People look at the outside, and that is all they see so they think that this is the whole. If the ouside is beautiful or ugly, the conclusions they draw about the whole tie up with this. However, without the grain of sand, a pearl cannot exist, and without this spark of love, there is no human. Even in Osama Bin Laden, albeit hidden, twisted, corrupted by the desposits on the outside, this spark exists. Even hatred is a form of love - how often have you heard the phrase "smothered with love," or heard of someone loving something so much that they destroyed it?

To get down to this core, you need to be cut. You need to tunnel through the outside, through the crap and gunge which seems to be real, but isn't. This is why suffering and love are so closely linked, why there isn't one without another in this life. And this is why, when so many people are cut, so many cores are exposed, and so much love is released.

Life doesn't seem reasonable, because it's not. Sorry. However, believe it or not, when you scrape away the gunge you find that, despite all the evidence and rationale to the contrary, Life is Beautiful.

posted September 29, 2001 09:06 PM            

*standing ovation*

posted September 30, 2001 11:30 AM            

quote:

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Then, immediately, I stuffed it all inside and put on a steely front. I didn't want myself to be able to feel the horror and pain.

---

This... this is me. I have a chemical depression (which Zoloft did nothing for). It doesn't mean I'm always unhappy, it means I'm almost always emotionally neutral, and detached from everything, as if it's a big game or story or something. I'm never swept away in a sea of {insert feeling here}. (Well, I wasn't until recently. But that has nothing to do with the WTC, and everything to do with something personal.) I think it's partially a developed defense mechanism too (calloused by mean elementary school teasing), so I try to sort of "snap out of it", but it's really hard. I don't become angry/sad, I decide I'm angry/sad. And that sucks.

So I've sent money to the Red Cross, attempted to donate blood (they were only accepting type O at the time), developed opinions on it, and talked about it a lot right here, but I haven't been able to sit down and realize just how impossibly bad the whole thing really is.

I feel really lucky to have not seen anyone jumping out of the building, although I have no idea how I managed that. But there's also a part of me that thinks that maybe it would have allowed me to realize exactly what was happening.

Edited for hot quoting action

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“It seems so quasi-tribal. Ugh! This America land! You no come here!” - Roup

“He probably has all sorts of weird sexy sex-kinks when he and his sexy sex-partner do their sexy dirty sex sex sex.” - The Onion