Some ponderances

I wasn't going to write anything about today, but I find that the memories are still too fresh, too vivid, to be put away once they surface. I don't celebrate today, as the President does, and I'm not wearing a black armband or carrying candles. People of all generations have their own cultural watershed events, things which changed the world forever. To me, there are two which stand out above all others, one because of the euphoria and positive future which lay open before us - the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the other is September 11. I was in my dorm Lounge for the fall of the Berlin Wall, sitting on those nasty cubes that stuck together as furniture. I was roughly 1000 miles to the east on 9/11/01. This is not the anniversary of the only tragedy that befalls us, and there are many other horrors worth remembering. On the other hand, I'm not letting Liar McFuckwit and his band of merry murderers take away my memories with their wars and their hate and their lies. I've talked before about that point, so I won't belabor it here.

I was living in Poughkeepsie, NY that year, teaching some very over-pampered brats at Vassar College, and my girlfriend lived in Bloomfield, NJ, while doing an ER residency in Newark. That semester, I didn't have classes on Tuesday, and I had gone out to a movie the night before (The Others) and then crashed at her place, waiting for her to come home from work. The plan was that she would sleep a little while, and then we'd hang out that afternoon. Soon after she got home from work, I went out to the grocery store to get some food for breakfast. I turned on the car radio, which had been on ESPN the night before, and heard Tony Kornheiser talking about the attack on the Pentagon. It was somewhat garbled, and I didn't really get what he was talking about, so I turned on one of the news stations. They were talking about the planes that hit the World Trade Center. The towers had not yet collapsed, and I didn't really understand what was going on - someone was really confused, mixing up the Pentagon and the WTC - after all, both couldn't have been attacked at the same time, so I went into the store and shopped. No one was talking about what I'd heard on the radio, so I figured it must not have been that big of a story. Of course, what it really meant was that the news was too fresh for everyone to have gotten it.

Driving back in the car, I listened to the news some more, and got back in time to turn on the TV and see the first tower fall. I woke my girlfriend up, telling her what had happened. She thought I was kidding, since it was an absurdity, and I was just trying to prevent her from sleeping. Eventually, she came out to the living room and saw the TV, and immediately started getting ready to go back to work. The page to come in came minutes later, since everyone thought there would be lots and lots of injured, and the NYC hospitals would be overwhelmed, sending the overflow to New Jersey. No one knew that there wouldn't be injured. She left for work, and I got in my car to drive home.

I could see the smoke rising from lower Manhattan. The towers stood roughly 10 miles from Bloomfield, which seems far with traffic. It's less with smoke. I drove up to Poughkeepsie, listening to the radio, trying to process what had happened. By now, we knew of the fourth plane, but everything else was chaos. Once I got home, I couldn't stay home alone - this was something I needed to be around others for. Most people weren't in work that day - classes had been cancelled, and many of the people at Vassar had strong New York connections. So I went on the computer, and spent much of the day on a now-long gone message board by the name of Boufdot and on email, talking to everyone I could. The Red Cross started up websites for donations, and a friend of mine figured out how to grab the numbers from Amazon's page and output a graph of the total donations versus time. The generosity of the world was stunning that day, as was the unity that seemed to be everywhere - we had to reach out in all directions, because we all needed help. The next day in class, I was supposed to go over projectile motion, and I was using military examples - hitting targets wth missiles. Somehow that seemed wrong to me. Still does.

The fall of the Berlin Wall meant a major change in the world - for 40+ years, we'd lived under the threat, sometimes more real than at others, that those Russian bastards would nuke us in our beds. My students today know nothing of this, thinking (if at all) of nuclear war as something as ancient as Dr. Strangelove. The attacks on September 11 could have opened the door to a wonderful time, where we came together to attack the ills of society that lead to terrorism, rather than to start a war, where we focused on what connects us instead of what divides us. We have been led astray by fear and hate. By greed and lies. By the willingness to make others suffer so that a few could thrive. We sacrifice what makes us, in principle, a great country.

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change? And did you exchange
a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,
year after year,
Running over the same old ground. What have we found?
The same old fears, wish you were here. - Roger Waters