I came close to crying a couple of times today when bits and pieces of the news came rolling in. But I didn't actually shed a tear until just now, when I started reading weblogs. Of course, everyone's talking about what happened. But what broke my heart was the sheer number of people who claim they don't care what's happened, or worse, those who claim to think it's funny. It's not a movie. It's not a summer blockbuster. Those people leaping out windows of the World Trade Center were real people. There were people this morning who spent the last moments of their existence staring down the business end of one of the world's tallest buildings, their minds trying to wrap around the idea that it was all over. It was just an ordinary day. How many times have all of us had just an ordinary day? How many times have we all jumped on an airplane, just wanting to go home. Not to sound like my grandmother here, but to those webloggers who think this is a joke: Shame on you. Shame on you for being such a cynical fuck that you think it attains you some new Level of Cool to act inhumanly callous about this. Christ knows that I am heavily critical of our society, but I can't muster any criticism for our nation's higher-ups here tonight. There are those who are saying that U.S. intelligence should have known this was going to happen. It's easy to say that in hindsight. The government shuffles through countless terrorist threats on a daily basis, the overwhelming majority of which yield absolutely nothing. How's anyone really to know what's real and what's not? Condemn the middle east. Condemn Afghanistan. Condemn Bin Laden. Condemn the executive branch for pulling out of the U.N. powwow. Condemn the Jews. Condemn whomever the fuck you want, if it really makes you feel better. But the fact of the matter is that this isn't anyone's fault (except, of course, for those who actually did the deed). It's just sad and senseless. And issuing your own little guilty verdict isn't going to rebuild the WTC buildings, or reconstruct those people in DC and New York and Pennsylvania whose bodies are now little more than a series of scattered molecules.
posted by Kate at 11:35 PM link/comments
