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Sep. 11th, 2002 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterI was just looking back at a chat log of a place where some friends and I hang out. It was the log of a year ago today. Reading through it, reliving the shock and horror we all felt that morning. Looking at pictures of it. It still seems so unreal—like a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
In the first photo, a plane hangs suspended in front of the tower. Hundreds of people in the plane. Thousands of people in the tower. I look closely, press my eyes up to the screen as if to see some trace of them…some people amid the pixels. I can't see them…but they're in there.
And then, they're gone. Globules of flame and smoke clump onto the tower, frozen in place as if someone had taken amber sap from a pine tree and glued it to a scale model.
When I think about the sheer magnitude of the tragedy…when I think about the horror those people must have felt in their last moments…it's bad enough that they died, but that they were able to look out their windows and see their death approaching…and not be able to do anything about it…when I think of how I would feel, and then multiply that by hundreds or thousands of people…
Then we've had all the changes in the year since then. Knocking the Taliban out of Afghanistan, taking all those prisoners who still sit there in that base in Cuba, waiting for their fate to be decided. Tightening of security, in the real and cyberspace worlds. Possible curtailment of all our rights. Will we ever again be the (relatively) innocent and care-free nation we were 366 days ago?
I won't be watching any of the observance programs on TV. I'll probably try to stay as insulated from it as possible. I'll light a candle. I'll hang out with the same friends I hung with a year ago when it was all going down. If they want to talk about it, I'll talk with them. If not, I won't. I will observe the day, and think about it…but I won't wallow in it.
In the first photo, a plane hangs suspended in front of the tower. Hundreds of people in the plane. Thousands of people in the tower. I look closely, press my eyes up to the screen as if to see some trace of them…some people amid the pixels. I can't see them…but they're in there.
And then, they're gone. Globules of flame and smoke clump onto the tower, frozen in place as if someone had taken amber sap from a pine tree and glued it to a scale model.
When I think about the sheer magnitude of the tragedy…when I think about the horror those people must have felt in their last moments…it's bad enough that they died, but that they were able to look out their windows and see their death approaching…and not be able to do anything about it…when I think of how I would feel, and then multiply that by hundreds or thousands of people…
Then we've had all the changes in the year since then. Knocking the Taliban out of Afghanistan, taking all those prisoners who still sit there in that base in Cuba, waiting for their fate to be decided. Tightening of security, in the real and cyberspace worlds. Possible curtailment of all our rights. Will we ever again be the (relatively) innocent and care-free nation we were 366 days ago?
I won't be watching any of the observance programs on TV. I'll probably try to stay as insulated from it as possible. I'll light a candle. I'll hang out with the same friends I hung with a year ago when it was all going down. If they want to talk about it, I'll talk with them. If not, I won't. I will observe the day, and think about it…but I won't wallow in it.