Wednesday, September 03, 2003
9-11 (orignal version written 9-14-02)
On September 11, 2002, in his log, the bbspot guy Brian Biggs put up a link where you could "Tell me how you feel" about the 9/11 hype. What follows is my email response (edited).
============================
It's nice of you to ask.
I don't watch TV news, but I did hear part of the ceremony in Pennsylania on the radio this morning, and tears did pop into my eyes. I watched some video clips of the same ceremony on Yahoo tonight, and the same reaction happened again.
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the victims in NYC or in Washington, nor that I'm unappreciative of the soliders, fireman, cops, and others who lost so much. It's not that I'm not still mad (though my perspective is unusual, and the target of my anger is not whom most people would expect).
But the emotion is still really only fresh for me when I think of the people on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I know how hard it was for me to comprehend the reality of what was happening at the time that it happened. I was sitting at my desk at work when my sister emailed me the news - that people had flown two planes into the World Trade Center - and it seemed to take me forever to truly grasp the thought that these were deliberate acts.
I can only be awed that there were people on that plane who were apparently not only able to absorb that truth from cell phone messages, but then had both the will and the courage to act on that truth. Awed and strangely proud. Could I have done that myself - looked past the shock, accepted my own death as inevitable, and acted in defense of... what? Other people? The country? Of was it just in defiance?
It doesn't matter - it was the right thing to do, whatever their motives. At least they didn't sit in denial, or waste their lives in useless panic. Maybe that's the source of the strange pride. Even now, with their example to follow, it's so easy to imagine myself taking the path of least resistance, avoiding the necessity to stand up and pay the price. But then I think "but they did it"... and for just a minute something flares up inside me, and I believe that maybe I could have done it too
For what that's worth.
============================
It's nice of you to ask.
I don't watch TV news, but I did hear part of the ceremony in Pennsylania on the radio this morning, and tears did pop into my eyes. I watched some video clips of the same ceremony on Yahoo tonight, and the same reaction happened again.
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the victims in NYC or in Washington, nor that I'm unappreciative of the soliders, fireman, cops, and others who lost so much. It's not that I'm not still mad (though my perspective is unusual, and the target of my anger is not whom most people would expect).
But the emotion is still really only fresh for me when I think of the people on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I know how hard it was for me to comprehend the reality of what was happening at the time that it happened. I was sitting at my desk at work when my sister emailed me the news - that people had flown two planes into the World Trade Center - and it seemed to take me forever to truly grasp the thought that these were deliberate acts.
I can only be awed that there were people on that plane who were apparently not only able to absorb that truth from cell phone messages, but then had both the will and the courage to act on that truth. Awed and strangely proud. Could I have done that myself - looked past the shock, accepted my own death as inevitable, and acted in defense of... what? Other people? The country? Of was it just in defiance?
It doesn't matter - it was the right thing to do, whatever their motives. At least they didn't sit in denial, or waste their lives in useless panic. Maybe that's the source of the strange pride. Even now, with their example to follow, it's so easy to imagine myself taking the path of least resistance, avoiding the necessity to stand up and pay the price. But then I think "but they did it"... and for just a minute something flares up inside me, and I believe that maybe I could have done it too
For what that's worth.
