9.14.01
for the past three days, i’ve been glued to NPR and CNN. this morning i woke up, sat down at the breakfast table with the newspaper and literally gagged on my cereal. i don’t know why i’ve been able to look at pictures of all the horror and destruction for the past three days but suddenly not today. maybe it was the juxtaposition of my daily routine (eat cereal, read the paper) with all the horror of the past week. maybe the shock just wore off. at any rate, i have no appetite for breakfast anymore, and since i can’t bear to listen to NPR, and somehow feel uncomfortable about rocking out with my favorite CD, i drive in silence.
some impressions:
my biggest concern is for the growing number of hate-crimes in america. an islamic center splashed with pig’s blood in san francisco, a mosque in texas full of bullet holes, an arab-american cab driver beaten to death in new york city – the list goes on. there’s even report of someone in boise being beaten because he looked like he might be arabic. he was from india.
my second biggest fear is that this will lead to war.
i wonder what the coming months will hold, and what it will be like to be an american in europe while this unfolds.
i’m mildly apprehensive about flying to amsterdam three weeks from now.
boise is full of american flags. everyone has flags flying half-mast on their truck antennas.
i am thankful that my friends who live and work near the crash sites in new york and dc are safe.
i worry about the fact that america’s leaders seem to think that it is enough to promise vengeance, and not also security. the american people want to see somebody pay for this crime, and george w. bush is going to give them that. but what i want to know is, why aren’t america’s leaders on the television assuring us that this will never happen again? why aren’t we examining america’s diplomatic behavior and questioning why it is that someone attacked us? otherwise, this terrorist or that one will hang, americans will mourn their losses and go back to their lives, and three years from now, something else just like this will happen.
i think that everyone has found it inspirational the way that america has spiritually and emotionally pulled together this week. it heartens me to see that no one has taken advantage of new york’s fragile state; their have been no reports of looting as far as i know. people from all over the country and indeed the world are donating blood and money, time and supplies. but in the midst of all this goodwill, i still have to ask what kind of moral are we giving to this story? that vengeance alone will account for the wrongs that have been done this week? what’s to keep children (or adults, for that matter) from waking up with nightmares, their (perhaps false) sense of security now destroyed? i am too young to really remember the cold war (the berlin wall came down when i was in the 6th grade). but i wonder what it was like to live without the sense of security that i grew up with – to honestly believe that any day, any moment, the entire world could come to an end. how do you live a normal life with a fear like that hanging close by?
when i first started watching CNN on tuesday morning, it was about forty-five minutes after the first plane had crashed. i was sitting in lauren’s apartment such that my back was to downtown san francisco. for the first hour or two, some part of me was honestly waiting to hear a boom from behind me as the transamerica pyramid or something else blew up. of course, as lauren later pointed out, san francisco thinks it’s more important than it really is, and the chances that terrorists would want to hit it are slim. that aside, i recall the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to fall…what was it like for the generation before mine to have spent all day every day subconsciously waiting for the bomb?
this post is full of question marks, as am i.
