I didn't even realize it was 9/11 until Prof. Osler pointed it out in PR today (I didn't see his blog entry until this afternoon). PC has a way of doing that, of throwing off your internal clock until you have no idea what day it is. Anniversary of a national tragedy? Oops. I was reading some divorcee's 21 alleged points of error.
So I don't have a 9/11 reflection post planned. I honestly forgot. I don't know what that says about me. Probably that I'm far too self-absorbed. Which is a fair charge. Every blogger, by nature, is at least a little self-absorbed.
I remember bits and pieces of that day. I remember getting on the Metro thinking I was going to get killed. I remember military helicopters flying overhead and being oddly comforted. I remember my coworker franctically trying to call his mom, who was supposed to be in the Towers that day. But no one's cellphone worked. I remember watching the second plane hit live on television.
But what I remember most was that it was a beautiful day. The birds chirped happily, blissfully unaware that the Pentagon was on fire just a few miles away. We walked outside and climbed on the roof of our office and looked at the clouds and thought:
In a world as beautiful as this, why do things like this happen?
I still don't know. The older I get, the dumber I get. I still don't understand. But today is a beautiful day and the birds are chirping outside, blissfully unaware of the affairs of humankind.
2 comments:
So much has changed since that day, and honestly the memory of those who died has been so exploited and so cheapened that I no longer have any desire to observe the day in any formal way.
I like to try to simply acknowledge the loss of those thousands of people and try to remember that those people didn't die "for" anything. They just died, and that it's inappropriate for strangers to ever try to speak for them or to assume that if they could speak, they'd speak in one voice.
Forgive my rather poor grammar. I blame the engineer in me.
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