Current mood:

awake

Hitsory, remembering, and where I was...
12:01a 09/11/2001 - Sitting in a car, discussing life, the universe, and everything. It's late, and cold, but I don't care. Anywhere is better than being home alone, and jmarquiso is good company. We're driving around town in a blue VW. Not this town, a different town, a fairy tale town, everything closed, and we're the only people awake.

I spent that morning with a New Yorker. Not a native of New York, but one of her sons all the same. Watched the color drain from his face as I can only assume it drained from mine. Laughed, with him, nervously as we turned to each other and asked if Orson Welles had been raised from the dead. If this was all some sick news caster's joke.

He hadn't, it wasn't, and we both realized that and sat in cold shock. The coffee tasted burnt, the tears neither of us had to shed then in it.

"Where were you," we thought our children would ask. We would tell them we were sitting at a table with a friend, our eyes glued to the televisions, our hearts and minds a thousand miles away. We would tell them that things never turned out quite the way you thought. We would tell them that we hadn't wanted to be alone.

But we were. In the way that every man is ultimately alone, the sole dweller in his own skin.

04:30a 09/11/2001 - Driving to the diner, a greasy spoon. Falling asleep in the passenger seat, but something compels me to stay in the car. Something drives me to go and drink coffee and eat burned hash browns rather than go home. Alone. Again. I want to be anywhere but in that darkness.

There have been news spreadfs for days, pictures of "Ground Zero". Rubble. New Yorkers on the television telling us how their city and their lives have changed. Psychologists exhorting us to heal, and politicians begging us to remember and feel afraid. "It could happen again," they repeat like a zen mantra, drilling it into our minds and hearts that we are never safe.

But growing up a white woman in the ghetto, I didn't feel safe to begin with.

While a talking head repeats the names and times of the towers falling, I think of the gunshot warzone only a few thousand (to be honest) feet from where I live now. I remember what it was like in my childhood. When BushCo. says "terr-ist", I hear the sights and sounds of crack deals at 3am. When I am told to feel fear, I do. But not of nameless brown-skinned people killing me for the glory of Allah.

And maybe that's the problem.

I don't fear suicide bombers. Statistically speaking, I'm still more likely in this country to die in a car accident than to ever even meet a suicide bomber. I don't fear liquids on planes, and I'm starting to wonder if an armed populace isn't a safer populace. We've spent so much time trying to hunt down a box-cutter or a gelatin based bomb, that we've lost sight of the truth. We're safer, statistically speaking, than we ever have been before. (And I don't mean by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I mean generationally.)

05:45a 09/11/2006 - We walk into the diner, and hear the story. We pale, we sit, I tap a plate with a butter knife accidentally. We order coffee, and food. We eat as if eating will banish the images in our head. My coffee is too sweet, and it still tastes bitter.

And Bush would like us to believe that things like this have never happened to anyone, anywhere. That we were picked on because we're special. That we should live in fear that our economic successes and social "reforms" have made us targets.

And Michael Moor would like us to believe that such things are a drop in the bucket. That our government is using them in malicious ways to control us. He'd like us to take the whispers from his words, the implications that maybe the government set this up, and if they didn't they've been using us all along since then.

And the Left points fingers at the Right, and the Right points fingers at the Left, and everyone blames someone else for something that no one had any control over.

And essential Liberty is sacrificed for temporary (and not particularly successful) Safety.

And the world keeps turning.

When they say "remember", I want to ask how anyone thinks I could forget. When the news reveals another terrorist plot, or transportation bombing (anyone remember London? Or is it only American tragedy you feed on?) some tiny part of my heart flip-flops in anguish.

But I refuse to shut myself into my house and think only approved thoughts. I refuse to shut myself in out of fear.

11:30a 09/11/2001 - We're in a park, the sky is silent. Nothing flies overhead, and the shadow of a bird passes on the grass. It startles me. We sit, swinging together, watching the few cars passing on the road, discussing the fact that everything is closed today. Work, school, life. I don't want to think about the fact that I work in the downtown of one of the most significant cities on the west coast. I have called my family, they're all alive, that's all I can ask. It is the only time I have ever felt nationalistic when passing the American flag on the street.

In the end, we are not so different from any other people who have tasted terrorist actions. The change came because we thought we were invincable. We thought America was different. A promise of Freedom, and Liberty. Hell, our nation got started with a good terrorist act (Boston Tea Party anyone?). For the longest time the only thing we had to worry about as a nation was people within our borders who didn't like what they saw.

Life never stops moving. We're not alone in our suffering, or our rememberance. Let us learn from the maturity of other nations and people, that you can remember and you can sorrow, but that you do not have to live in the memory and the sorrow. Let us learn that it is true, the only thing we must fear is fear. Let us learn that in five years, in ten years, in fifty years, what we will tell our children is not that we were afraid, but that we survived.

And let us, now, be survivors. Let us give up fear, and find strength in the remaining void.

10:45p 09/11/2001 - As I talk with the Canadian, and he reassures me that everything will be fine, I relax. The knot in my stomach loosens a little, and I find I can give myself over to the deep blackness of sleep. Another day ended, the sun will rise again in the morning. Life continues, as it always does.