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story2232.xml

born-digital

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2002-09-11

The following is a journal entry written on the exact day of September 11, 2001:

.Explosions.

SEPTEMBER 11 2001.

I guess this is our "Kennedy". Where were YOU on the morning of September eleventh, two thousand one?

I was in history class, third hour when I found out. I walked in and the TV was on. Considering it was a history class I didn't think this was too terribly out of the ordinary (I mean, compared to somethin? like math or Spanish or whatever), and I didn't really pay that much attention at first (I'm not a large TV person, much less news). Everyone else seemed to be pretty attentive to it though, so after not too long I went over to check it out. They were showing footage of a building with a lot of smoke and fire coming out of it. For a while actually I thought it was old video footage (?cause the Trade Center had been bombed before this), but when they started saying things about late breaking news I started to get the picture.

It actually took me a bit of time before I really started to pick up on all of the implications (I'd been sorta preoccupied with a math test of earlier in the morning). My first thought was just, "what is this going to do to international relations?" (Admittedly a valid one, but still not one that I'm all together proud of). Then they started talking about one of the towers collapsing (it was just speculation at this point), and also somewhere around this time they told us about the Pentagon as well. They hadn't told us any numbers yet, but my math brain started working, and that sorta set off a chain reaction. I knew how big the Pentagon was (a mile in circumference) and the Trade Center was obviously a very big building (actually I had thought it was only something like 80 or 90 stories, but I guess it's 110). I looked at my watch, and at first thought that things were more or less ok, but then I realized that the East Cost is on the same time zone as us, that this right now was during the work day, that all of those buildings would have been filled with people.

So yeah, I had the unfortunate luck not only to have a brain that at least reasonably quickly rang up some very disturbing estimates (which were actually on the low side, I estimated that there would only be something like 20,000 in the trade center [one hundred floors {I rounded up from my estimation} with a couple hundred people on each floor], but now I hear it's 50 plus), but also that annoying little empathy thing. So yeah, I pretty much lost it at that point and started sobbing (it got even worse when reports came in of another attack [it appears though that this one didn't actually happen]). Eventually the teacher noticed and sent me off to the bathroom. Yeah, high school bathrooms aren't the very nicest place in the world to cry in (and it wasn't my first time either). The worst part about it is how when you're the only person in there it echos about, so the sound of your own sobs comes back to you; wrapping around you like the promise of a comforting arm only to turn out to be your own misery come back to punish you.
At some point one of the hall monitor people came and took me off to the guidance office. Scott was busy, but really, even though I see him at least somewhat frequently, it's always just for business stuff, so it's not like I had any emotional attachment to him or anything. So yeah, I ended up with Maggie Miller. She seemed pretty nice and such, I don't know, I mean, she's a school councilor, you've pretty much got to be a good person to be that sort of a profession. So yeah, I sorta calmed down there and talked for a bit with her (my heart really goes out to her, ?cause her daughter in law works in the building right next to the trade center), then some other girl named Audrey (looked vaguely familiar) came in, equally distraught and the three of us talked for a while. Then Maggie had to go off to a meeting so the two of us headed back to class.

I got back with maybe five minutes or somethin' left in history class. By that time it was confirmed that the one tower had indeed collapsed, and the other had just followed suit. I took my estimations (which had been something around 1,500 people dead) and doubled them. I just about broke down again, but I realized that would be pretty pointless so I refrained from doing so. I went to band next hour, but as soon as I got in the room and realized that Barry was having us march (a lot of people don't realize this, but at heart he really is a good person. However, I have been on more than one occasion extremely disappointed in him and his lack of sensitivity [he makes people cry on at least a semi-regular basis], and this was one such time). So yeah, I looked around to see if Kim was there (she's probably the most similar person in the school I know of in terms of the whole empathy issue [most people didn't really get it how I could be so incredibly upset if I didn't know anyone directly in the attack]), but she wasn't (I later learned that she had gone home for a while). So yeah, I went straight from band back to the guidance office.

There were three or four people watching a TV in there, so I just sorta sat down with them for a while. Oh god, watching that footage of the tower collapsing, no one else quite seemed to realize the implications of that, that we were watching video tape of people being murdered. Every millimeter that this big black tower went down on our TV was some scared person being crushed to death as the floor fell out from beneath them and the sealing crashed down on them (just think about that for a bit, think about what the feeling is like when you unexpectedly fall, our nervous systems are wired to tell us that is a VERY BAD thing, and they produce an according reaction of shock and terror. Now think about being stuck inside a building, explosions have gone off, you don't know what's happening, you've felt the building shake like it's in an earthquake. You're scared out of your mind, trying to find a way out. The building shakes again, you start to feel the floor move underneath you, pieces of ceiling are falling down all around you so you crawl under a nearby desk for cover. All of a sudden you get that falling sensation, your nervous system goes into full panic alert just in time for it to all sink in before a piece of concrete the size of your torso comes crashing down onto you. Your head is hit first, killing you instantly so that your head now looks like one of the deflated basketballs. As your body falls it gets twisted and mutilated beyond recognition. Twelve days later, due to lack of complete evidence dental records are inconclusive, but they tell your wife that they believe that they've at least found pieces of your body amongst the rubble.

They say empathy is feeling other's pain, and that's exactly what it is. Stories like that only far more vivid than I can convey at this point went through my head at a dozen a second every time I saw footage of one of the towers going down, or of the planes crashing into them.

You live and work in Boston along with your two little kids. Your husband has been away on a trip on the West coast, and now you're going out to join him for a family vacation. Even though they try to hide it, your kids are somewhat nervous because this is their first time flying. You manage to calm them down, and they actually start to get a little excited about the prospects of being up in the air as well as getting to see Daddy and go on a vacation. You've only just gotten over the drama of your kids dealing with the pressure change and their ears hurting when you see several men walking quickly up the aisles towards the front of the plane. About a minute later a man comes on over the intercom, speaking in broken English, saying that the plane has been hijacked and that everyone on it must do exactly what they say or else they will be killed.
The plane then makes a sharp turn and starts rapidly descending. After not too long you are able to see out of your window that you are approaching downtown New York. Someone behind you says something about heading straight towards a building. You look out and can see two large towers rapidly approaching. You slowly start to realize what is happening, and realization starts to sink in. The people around you are scared and confused and although your youngest daughter can't completely understand everything that's going on, she most definitely does not like it. She starts screaming loudly and one of the men demands that she be shut up. You try your best but have only limited success. The next thing you know she's been grabbed from your arms and the man has sent a knife up through her chin into her brain, killing her. You scream as the now limp body of your daughter falls upon your lap and you hardly notice the voice on the intercom talking about a great victory as the plane crashes into the building and you are instantly killed.

You own your own business and work out of your apartment, only ten minutes from downtown. Just as you are starting your work day you get a call that the volunteer fire department that you are a part of is calling on all of it's members. Something very bad has happened at the Trade Center and they want you there immediately. Your boyfriend pleads with you not to go, but you feel a sense of duty calling you nonetheless, you know that people may be in danger and that you might be able to help them.
You arrive on the scene and your coordinating officer tells you that there's been a very large explosion but that they're looking for survivors in the rubble. You head in, the debris in the air is so thick that you can barely see in front of you, but you can hear someone's cries to your right. You start heading towards them, shouting that you're coming. As you get closer the cries get louder, you're almost there. You trip on an unseen obstacle and fall down, painfully cutting your hand and arm on yet another unseen peril. You struggle to get up, but realize that you're getting steadily weaker as your body is unable to get enough oxygen through all of the dust, and smoke which is now filling the air. Yet still you push on, knowing if only you can get to the person you're trying to rescue, maybe just maybe you'll be able to do something. You give it everything you've got and then some, but your vision is closing in and you suddenly find yourself on the ground again. As you draw you final breath you realize not only that you will die, but that so will the person now so close to you, and that you have failed.


Dozens, literally dozens of these went through my head, in perfect detail just as if I had been there living them myself. I have a powerful mind which usually is a good thing, but right here the immense capacity to be processing these things at a blinding pace was in no way a friend of mine. I could go on for days writing these down, stories from every side of the event, every perspective. I could publish a book of them. But what would be the point? These aren't just stories, that although they were made up solely in my head, I can guarantee that every one of them is not too far off from an actual story. Like the holocaust thing where you give them all sorts of personal information about yourself and you get a card, telling all about someone exactly like you who was murdered.

Really, I have a lot of things I could write about right now. I've only barely scratched the surface on describing my emotional condition, I haven't finished talking about my day. I could talk about all of the bad things that are going to come of this, how this was only the start, how so many more innocent people will now be persecuted. I could talk about all the good things, how even in the face of this unexplainable act human goodness will still shine through. I could talk about all of the implications of this, what it will mean for my life and the lives of everyone around me. I could talk about half a dozen things at least, each one of them as extensive as this whole journal entry has been so far.

And yet, my life goes on, and whether I like it or not I have responsibilities if I want to keep things on their general course. My life goes on, even if it doesn't for thousands of people, even if for tens of thousands things would be better if their's didn't, easier, less painful. In the face of all of that, my life goes on, and the only scars I will take away from this will be those in my mind. My life goes on, and I know that if I ever hope to find peace with all of this, the only way to do so will be to take every part of hate that's been thrown into this world, and throw back two parts of love in return. Because really, that's the only thing I can do.

I'll write more when I'm able to.


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This was written a few hours after the first entry on September 11, 2001:

.Fighting Back.

September 11. 2001.

I've decided that I do indeed want to take efforts to fight back. I'm not precisely sure as to what I'll do. A lot of people are giving blood and there's a very great need for that. I wonder if I'd be able to get away with lying about my age and sexuality to do that (perhaps they'd be less tight at a time like this). Not sure though, that seems uncertain. Some people on the listserve were talking about actually going over to New York, but that really just isn't possible for me at this point in my life. It seems though that there should be some sort of aid organization around here that I'd be able to do something through. And if not, well, I suppose there's always the option of making one. That's a lot of work though, a lot of resources, not positive whether it would really be a viable option to do that or not. Whatever the way though, I am determined to do something to fight back, to show the world what really happens when you try to use hate and violence. Show the world that the human capacity for love is greater than any other force on the planet, and like Mahatma Gandhi said, "nonviolence is more powerful than the most potent weapon of destruction devised by mankind."


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This is a reflection which I wrote on September 10, 2002:

.Reverberations.

September 10, 2002

It didn't really hit me until today, the real significance of the impending (good word for this situation) approach of the anniversary of the terrorist attacks last year. It's 'cause I've been preoccupied with thinking about Iraq, I believe. I've been thinking about the 130% increase in the mortality rate of children under the age of five there since the US imposed sanctions (I refute the notion that they were imposed by the UN). I've been thinking about how with around 100,000 child deaths per year, it's quite probably that we've been killing somewhere in the range of 50,000 of those children every year, for ten years straight (kinda puts the 3,000 people killed in the world trade center attacks in a little bit more perspective). I've been wondering how, as my brother says "dropping bombs for peace again" is going to help the Iraqi people if we aren't even willing to treat them like human beings in the first place. I've been wondering how many more Afghanistans, Iraqs, El Salvadors, Columbias, Vietnams, Berlins, Hiroshimas we're going to destroy in the name of "bringing stability to the world" (rough translation being, knock everyone else to the ground 'cause when you're lying on your back you've got a low center of gravity and are therefore stable- yeah! Great logic George W.!)

Today in AP gov we watched a documentary about the attacks (what's it with social sciences classes and terrorist attacks?). It was one made by some French film makers, apparently it was pretty famous (though I of course hadn't heard of it before). I guess for a lot of people, it might not have been as shocking 'cause they'd already seen footage of the towers many, many times on television, but for me, since I haven't watched TV in the past two years, this was the first time since September 11th last year that I saw that footage (and consequently I was not in the least bit num to it).
I found it to be an extremely difficult (and painful) experience to watch all of that again and have all of my emotions from this time last year come back to me. My mind still sees everything in a very personal perspective. When I watched video footage of the planes crashing into the buildings, I didn't think in terms of a massive projectile hitting a stationary object, I thought in terms of several hundred airline passengers spending their last minutes in terror, I thought in terms of people watching their coworkers being incinerated alive. What's more, I didn't think just in terms of the people, I thought in terms of the individuals, what it was like for them.
I believe that is how my mind works. I really believe that there are statistics which are far beyond the realm of human comprehension. Speaking from the perspective of a person who has spent the past two and a half years trying (with the inevitably incomplete success) to comprehend the death of one person (albeit my best friend), I just don't see how it's even remotely possible for the human mind to fathom 3,000 deaths in the trade center attacks, or 500,000 Iraqi children dying of disease and starvation, or 8,000,000 Jewish people dying in the holocaust, or 1,000,000 massacred in the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. I don't think it's really possible to say things like the holocaust was 8 times worse than what happened in Rwanda because the human mind simply cannot comprehend numbers of that stature.
What my mind does instead is to personalize it all. I might not be able to understand a nation, a community, a building being destroyed, but I can at least come close to understand a person or a family being destroyed. And so that's what my mind does, it puts names and faces onto the nameless and faceless masses. It's not the sort of thing which is bad, or good, or anything like that, it's just how I happen to work.
I wasn't able to make it through the whole video (if I would have stayed I just would have started crying and would have needed to leave anyway, so I didn't see much point). The part that put it over the top for me was when they had the footage from the first floor of the towers (before they fell down) and then in the background you just started seeing all of these things falling down, and they weren't rubble, but people, and every time you heard a thunk (they were quite loud) it was another person dying, right there, on video tape. I don't understand how the other people could have stayed though. Watching a video tape of human beings getting murdered....how can people watch things like that? It doesn't seem possible to me that they could, it blows my mind. The only explanation that I can offer is that they must not be fully comprehending what they're watching, that they're seeing people just like them die, because I don't believe that any person who really comprehended the significance of watching another person die could stand to witness it. I left the room though. After seeing something like that in real life, the appeal of watching it on video footage drops directly to zero.
And so yeah, I guess I am finding out that I'm perhaps still a little more raw about the whole incident than I thought I was. It still does seem just about as real now as it did last year, just as real and just as disturbing. As with last year I'm also very disturbed about what we're about to do to another country (last year was Afghanistan, this year is Iraq, oh god, what will be next?), but as with last year, the concern and anguish I feel over what we're doing to other people in no way lessen the way I feel about what was done to us. Both are horrendous acts of evil and both go beyond my scope of comprehension.
Therefore I'm left with much the same mix of emotions I had around this time last year, horror both for what has happened and what will happen. They're calling for everyone to wear patriotic colors tomorrow. I don't feel I can do that though. Therefore I'm going to wear all black with a tee-shirt bearing the quote from the Qur'an

"He who saves one life,
Has saved the whole world.
He who has killed a human being
Has killed all mankind"

Black is for mourning because that is the emotion I feel most attuned with. I certainly don't feel swept up in a patriotic fervor. Such a show of solidarity and community seem at best meaningless to me (because what they are solidarity for is not specifically defined) and at worst alarming (because of what some people might define them as). Although I do feel things like horror and outrage that I was describing above, they really aren't my prevailing emotion.
My prevailing emotion is sorrow; sorrow and mourning. I mourn for all of the innocent people of this world who have died unjustly and I feel sorrow for dark depths that the human condition and heart can sink to (though I do still staunchly maintain my faith in overall human goodness)I feel the quote is appropriate because it's not specific or one sided, I'm not condemning any one side, I'm saying that all killing is equally wrong. And yet at the same time, it offers the glimmer of hope which I feel is essential in times like this. When faced with the question of how we're supposed to respond to the deaths of more people than we can comprehend, it gives a very simple, clear, relevant and most importantly applicable answer. I cannot understand all of the evil in this world anymore than I have power to stop it all. What I can do though is just to do all of the good that I can in my world, and somehow, I have faith, that will be enough.