kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Poor Tribute. You do what you can. I’m not the best person to be talking about September 11. I didn’t lose anyone, I didn’t know anyone who lost anyone (except for online-acquaintances) and living in Podunk, New England, we were very little affected except that for the first time in my life I heard actual racist remarks. New England is largely color-blind—but that’s a digression for another day. There was very little that directly impacted on us—my mother spent several hours getting out of lockdown—she worked a clerical job at the local Navy base. She ended up getting home at her usual time, but spent several hours trying to get there nonetheless due to the car searches. Shiny Princess SIL only worked several blocks from Ground Zero, and for a time we thought the tremendous horrors of that day might humanize her—something that has yet to occur. So I’m not somebody who can talk about September 11, or add anything useful. But I can talk about war. War, I know. I grew up in the shadow of two military bases within a ten-mile radius of my house. And I grew up during the days of the Evil Empire, when the Russians were hiding behind an iron curtain with only nuclear weapons peeking through the fabric of an opaque and alien culture. I knew (god, how early was it? I seem to have absorbed that knowledge in with my Tang and Cheerios) that if the War came, That War, the Last War, that I would simply cease to exist in the incalculable roar and blinding flash of the first wave of atomic missiles. The Air Force base near us was the first anti-missile response base on the East Coast, and the Navy base four miles in the other direction was the only place to service nuclear submarines for 500 miles in any direction. They didn’t bother to teach duck-and-cover in the local schools—too late to be naive enough to believe that a desk would protect you from fallout, and too realistic to think that anyone two miles away from a prime military target would survive. Every day was spent in the invisible shadow of the mushroom-cloud-that-could-be at any moment. I’m not sure if I even connected the nuclear threat with actual people or issues—I remember seeing “War Games” –remember that? Starring Mathew Broderick? and thinking that’s the way things were, with computers controlling the atomics. Like any child, I absorbed this as perfectly natural. Enough so that it was an actual shock, a destabilization of some of what I’m built on, when the Iron Curtain came down. I remember watching the footage of people dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, with tears streaming down my face and a dizzy feeling like a chair had been whipped out from under me—I had caught myself, but was still reeling. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled—but something was gone… something as basic to me as the sun rising every morning. But because of when and where I grew up, I expected one of two things from war. Let me go back a little further in time. The summer that I was eight or nine, one of the local Iron Horsemen (local motorcycle gang) died in a particularly stupid accident. These were the High Harley Days, and oddly enough, my teensy little town was a hub for a lot of the motorcycle folk. Conspiracy theory abounded, and tensions ran high. The Horsemen accused the local cops of deliberately closing the gate in the off-season to the state park—which Buddy had decapitated himself on, doing 90 mph in a 10mph zone –and the cops quite rightly replied that well, in May the state park wasn’t open yet, it definitely was never open at 12:30 am in the morning, and if Buddy’s blood alcohol level hadn’t been high enough to make him a candidate for spontaneous combustion, that might have occurred to him. What I remember most about that summer—and the tensions ran throughout the summer—was the dusty, drowse heat of my tiny town, and always, always, the sounds of motorcycles, revving. They echoed through the streets as if no other sound existed. We knew (how the hell did we know? Who should be telling children these things?) that if it came down to the cops versus the bikers, it would be fists and handguns and lengths of chain. That if someone died, it would be at the direct hands of their enemy. Do you see where I’m going, NSR? Do you understand, now, how I see war? Either you have the glass crater—and no passion—or you have the fists and the hand to hand—and intimate knowledge and intimate rage. I don’t understand September 11th and its aftermath in light of any of my experience. I cannot imagine anyone hating an abstract like an “entire country” or “a way of life” or even “Americans” enough that they could hijack four planes and use them to kill over 3000 people. It is obviously not impersonal—the amount of rage involved must have made it difficult to breathe. But it is not personal either—they did not know any of the people that they condemned to death intimately, they had not lost a fellow friend and brother of the road to one of those involved. I cannot imagine the depth of the pain of the survivors. How can you move past the rage and the pain if there is no one to blame? No satisfactory reason or explanation? I’ve lost no one and nothing, except for a few hours of sleep here and there—and the rage that sweeps through me about those events makes me feel like an asthma attack is coming on—and there it sullenly swirls in my lungs, like smoke and ashes, with nowhere to properly go. And what I feel must be a pale shadow of a mushroom cloud of pain that was. I don’t understand this War on Terrorism. I’m not a political person, really—the way I have understood this war is that we are dumping a lot of bombs and killing a lot of folks because their Oppressive Overlords wouldn’t give up a terrorist who might or might not have been responsible for the planes and they weren’t even admitting whether they had him or not. I’m not saying someone shouldn’t have nuked the hell out of the Taliban….there is no question that they were evil and horrible men—but they deserved whatever they got on their own merits. I remember when Russia finally pulled out of Afghanistan in the 1980’s—we as a nation loved it. A bunch of scruffy hill fighters like we were a bunch of scruffy hill fighters, 200 years ago had run the Evil Empire off their patch. Hooray for the underdog. I’d always been a huge fan of Afghan jewelry—a jeweler told me that the reason so much brass was turning up in their designs in the 1990’s was because they were melting down the gun emplacements for the brass, now that the Russians were gone. When you melt the guns emplacements into jewelry or beat the swords into plowshares , I, for one, am delighted. How on earth did things change? I’m all in favor of running people that we could prove had something to do with it through the nearest woodchipper in centimeter-by-centimeter increments….but I do not understand this war. Someone, show me who to fight. Tell me where I can pour out my rage. Because the pieces of September 11th that I do understand sometimes just swamp me—the microcosm, the individual people—Flight 93, and each individual person who worked to take that plane into the ground instead of a civilian population. The two guys who carried someone in a wheelchair down 50-odd flights of stairs in the World Trade Center. The military reservist working in the Pentagon who stopped in the middle of a crumbling hallway, and felt her way through black curtains of smoke to her friend, and pulled her free. The firemen who kept on going UP. One of my friends on a jewelry forum whose brothers, brothers-in-law, fathers, uncles, cousins—were NYC PD and FD and she posted to the forum in fits and starts, and her messages were full of typos and tears. Checking online for friends in far places, and my heart slowing down each time another one got to a computer and reported in. These were the things that I understood. The other was as inexplicable and mysterious and opaque as an earthquake. Give me an evil empire to nuke. Or someone to take apart with my fists. But before any of that—give back to the people who actually lost something. Give them hope and joy and solace and make of them what you will, O Universe; give them love and strength and pride. Let them know that they are loved and fought for and guarded well and let them know that sometime the fight may be to some purpose. Let everyone who lost something in the crumbling of the Towers and the sheets of fire in the Pentagon and in that lonely field in Pennsylvania, be it family, friend, lover, cousin, child, may they find again something in which to take joy. Give blood. Give time. There are thousands of small wars fought every day for folks to survive—help them. These wars are fought with fists and food and handguns and warm coats. Stop them, oh Universe, and never again let someone abstractly hate and take a plane into a Tuesday morning office. I am not the best person to talk about September 11th. I told you. 9:39 p.m. - 2002-09-11 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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