caerula's Diaryland Diary

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things fall apart

We just heard the unimistakable sound of a military jet overhead, curiously loud in the silent skies. My coworker one cubicle over is on the phone reassuring her 11-year-old son, who saw it from his backyard because his school was closed today, that we are safe, and the plane is there to protect us. A conversation I never dreamed I would have to hear. That moment, just now, has for me more than anything else defined the change that has overtaken our world.

Thankfully YMB is too young to really comprehend the enormity of what happened, and however the world changes from here on out, it will be the world he has always known. It won't define him like it will us. Sadly, he also may not grow up in the kind of security we envisioned now that we no longer live with nuclear warheads pointed at our shores. He won't grow up secure in the knowledge that it can't happen here, that war is a faraway thing that won't touch him. He may never casually board an airplane. His world will not be the world we knew day before yesterday. But at least he won't have the memories. The images won't be emblazoned onto his brain, burnt there by a thousand repitions on televison. It will be dim, like my memory of when John Lennon was shot. I was in 3rd grade, like YMB is now, and I remember our music teacher had us write sympathy letters to his widow on wide ruled paper with thick red pencils. There are too many letters to be written, now, for all the 3rd graders in the country to manage. Too many for all the wide ruled paper in the world.

I picked YMB up from school yesterday, although he could have ridden the bus home. He'd heard nothing at school, and had a note send home from the principal in his bag, briefly informing parents that the school made the decision not to mention it so as not to disrupt the school day and frighten children. I told him in a straight-forward, bare-minimum kind of way, that some very bad, very confused people did a very bad thing. His eyes went big in the rearview mirror.

The first thing he asked was about QueenV, whom he calls "Aunt-"; he knows she lives in New York, but with his grasp of geography has no idea of the difference between Manhattan and Long Island. Once I reassured him that she was ok, he was fine. When we got home I did turn on the tv because he wanted to know what the buildings looked like. We saw the footage of the towers falling down, and then we turned off the tv. He had a couple of questions -- "did they do that on purpose?" was the worst, because how do you explain that? But he played Gameboy, walked the dog, read a Dr. Seuss story, and had a hot dog for dinner. Soccer practice was cancelled, and that was probably the biggest impact on him for the day. Thank God.

When I got home from work yesterday, about 1 pm -- I did leave early, since my focus was shot anyway -- Blue was just getting up. He stumbled in bleary-eyed from the bedroom to where I sat already in the den, glued to the television. He look bemused and bewildered, to find me home watching tv in the middle of the day. He gets home at 7:30 am and goes to bed, usually. Yesterday he was up doing a few chores until 9 or so, and heard about the first crash, but went to bed before anything else happened. We sat together in silence and watched the same footage over and over for hours, until he had to leave for a meeting and I went to pick up YMB.

Anytime YMB was out of the room, I turned the tv back on. We don't have cable, and so alternated between the local stations, most of which had gone to a national feed. The local interruptions -- to show the mayor of Dearborn, which houses one of the largest Arabic populations in the country, asking for tolerance and patience; local newscasters looking grim and shaken and mouthing the same platitudes they'd heard from the nationals, since no one knew what to say; the computer graphics "Day of Terror" and "America Attacks" emblazoned across the screen -- these got tiresome. And the networks inevitably began to repeat themselves, and the anchors got tired and snippy, and still I couldn't tear myself away. We turned off the tv for good about 7:30. I went to bed soon thereafter, ridiculously early, but I was both physically and emotionally exhausted. Inevitably, I woke up alone at 3 am -- Blue goes in to work at 11 pm -- and turned the tv back on, to see new footage of the first plane, of the streets of Manhattan looking like a nuclear wasteland, to hear the first stories of phone calls from the planes and the doomed building. Christ. It's everywhere, and it's overwhelming.

I meant to pick up a copy of the Free Press this morning, as their coverage is generally always admirable and thorough, but I didn't have time. I went instead to their web site and found those who can say it much better than I can. Mitch Albom, who was and mostly still is a great sportswriter even after Tuesdays With Morrie, expresses better than I ever could my vague feelings about America's reaction to tragedy at home, and how greatly it differs from our reaction to tragedy far away:

"The new war began with pictures of smoke, mushrooming smoke, billowing clouds of smoke, smoke that rose above the busiest skyline in the busiest city in the busiest nation in the world, yellow smoke and white smoke and a deathly shade of gray smoke. Smoke filled with jet fuel, with the debris of airplanes, with the shattered glass of two of the tallest buildings in the world, with the charred flesh of victims, smoke filled with what used to be a uniquely American attitude, one that said, 'We are safe here, we are the biggest, the richest, the proudest, so we are the most secure.'

That is gone now, blowing in the ashy winds above New York City and Washington and Somerset, Pa.

We are not safe."

I know some good will come of this; some always does. I wonder if one of those will be a heightened sense of empathy with the rest of the world, much of which suffers large-scale destruction and death on a daily basis, as an everyday occurence. Our feelings, when we watch terror, starvation, genocide on the news, tends be pity, but a superior kind. War is something we export, not something we live with. What tragedy, in Ireland, in Israel, in the Sudan. Thank God it can't happen here, at least.

It can. It did.

"We have been lucky in America. We have lived pleasantly ignorant of the terror that threatens other nations every day. No more. That smoke was our innocence. That smoke was our peace of mind. It is disappearing now in the bloody skies above New York and Washington and Pennsylvania."

11:35 a.m. - 2001-09-12

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