i am so frustrated this week. every night since last thursday, i have had the worst time trying to get to sleep, and i have been waking up between 1 and 3AM and being awake for at least 2 hours. that blows! i really don't mean to be, but i can be kind of a bitch if i don't get all my sleep...
it's all chris's fault.
so what's going on right now? church on 9/11 was tough. the 9AM service was packed more than usual, and everything went faster. tom skipped the sermon, and instead we did responsive prayers that were adapted for both 9/11 and hurricane katrina. see, i remember exactly where i was that morning four years ago. i was asleep when the phone rang, and i did everything i possibly could to roll over in bed and ignore it, but it just kept ringing and ringing. so i pick up, and derek is vehemently insisting that i turn on the news. i do, and there's the horrible footage of the first plane hitting the WTC. and then, as the cameras were trained on the scene, i saw the 2nd plane hit. i just kept saying "oh my God, oh my God..." it got worse as they showed people hanging out of windows and some jumping to their deaths. and then the towers collapsed. i saw it all. i can't imagine even being there--it must have frantically traumatic and horrifying. and then they didn't show how the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and nobody really knew right away about the fourth one that crashed in Pennsylvania. then, in 2002, i was in NYC and went to the WTC site. it was this huge gaping hole. thousands of people had died, and nothing was left, except for the steel beams that had fallen and formed a cross. i still choke up when i think about that. God, how can that happen here? we seem to think that we're above it all, that we're invincible, that we rightfully dominate the world. but we're not. and our heart is cut out in the process.
okay, so i didn't think i was going to get this serious. it was interesting last summer, when i gave a paper at a conference in Leeds. i was comparing the rhetoric of George Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress to an article written by Don DeLillo. three years after, my international audience could not understand why my entire country was devastated, when the horror occurred in only two cities and in a rural field. and this summer, practically exactly a year after that conference, london exploded. it made me wonder how my British listeners were doing and if and how they were changed. now i think there's a more global awareness of civic vulnerability. so what are we going to do about it?
here. you need to read this--> http://www.jwp4.netfirms.com/delillo.html
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1 comment:
see, i think the issue comes down to this---the U.S. has, historically speaking, come out relatively unscathed from the rest of the world's violence. We have even been isolated even from the consequences of the violence we inflict on others---that's not to pass judgement, just a statement that very few Americans have first hand experience with armed conflict of any sort.
This is not true in most of Europe; not only has open warfare existed on European soil for most of the last 500 years, even when there isn't an active war, there have usually been folks like the IRA in the United Kingdom or ETA in Spain wreaking havoc.
So, yeah, for someone in England, 9/11 is a terrible tragedy, but not to be compared to WWII or 75+ years of IRA bombings. I think that if the U.S. had that collective experience, we Americans would be far less enthusiastic about all of our various military endeavors.
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