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Many of us are still struggling to shake off the malaise induced by the WTC attack... many of us haven't been as productive as we've been in the past. Talking with friends this week, I've found many are apologetic and guilty: they haven't been able to get much done and since they didn't lose anyone they knew personally, they feel that their grief is somehow out of place, out of measure.
Our president told us to go back to work. He promised to get those guys (who ever "those guys" are). But he didn't tell us how to deal with our loss-- and we all had a loss. The loss of our precious ordinariness. A plane flying over head that was invisible to me last month fills me with sorrow for lost dreams. A large truck makes me nervous about chemical warfare. A young male friend suddenly seems vulnerable to draft and death. Our assumptions have been shaken, and an unfocused fear has taken its place.
So give yourself permission to mourn your everyday life, interrupted so brutally. Don't feel guilty for the past malaise. Then take stock in your pleasures: your favorite album, your favorite movie, your favorite book. Open the nice bottle of wine you've been saving, buy the hardback version of the novel from your favorite author, the rare import CD from your favorite band. Stop staring listlessly at the monitor and steal away from work to catch some sunshine. Admit we all lost something Tuesday-- not metaphorically, but truly. Only then we can do what we each need to return to our lives. Each in our own way, at our own pace.
Mh mh...
I was walking back home, in an italian city where I live.
The sidewalk on the right, to be precise (or is it walkside? At times I have shortcomings with my english).
Passing by the postal office, I saw a strange group gathered outside the bar in front of me. It was a very sunny day.
Never seen people gathered outside that bar, eagerly looking inside. What the hack.
I crossed the road. I saw a couple of tourists getting out of the bar crying. I just couldn't figure out.
Entering, I saw the tv set on. Cnn, which is unusual in Italy. I mean, Cnn _english_ edition in Italy, you see...
A speaker. A strange background of fuzzy images. Uhm. Then the skyscrapers. Then a plane. About three or four seconds to realize that that was for real.
Next night, going to a bar, I witnessed a woman at 2.30am getting out of the bar and shouting "imperialist americans you've got your lesson!".
She was a woman in her early twenties, who arguably barely saw an american in her entire "life", and who, as all of us here, experienced at least as a theoretical legacy what it means being soundly defetaed after having pledged alliance with that "cute" guy named Adolf Hitler and then after having lost the fuc*ing war having experienced not the debts of war to repay but the reconstruction financed with american money.
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: "Those who seek in liberty something else beside liberty, are meant to be slaves".
A girl who spent her whole life seeing shops crammed with food and who thought it's normal. A girl who goes out every night, Nikes at her feet and Rhum and Coke at the bar and Nokia self phone to say to her boyfriend that she's got a new tattoo and other worthless amenities, and who since she was born saw she could speak her mind without being arrested - and who thought it's all normal, it's all warranted to her becasue she fought for it or because she is so beautiful...
In short, a person that has eaten and drunk and enjoyed a basically and fundamentally american settlement of society and who was "enraged" at the "imperialitic americans". Wow. She has no clue what an "imperialist" looks like: she has never seen one. In Afghanistan they would have probably performed surgical operations on her.
She probably thought that what she has was due to the job (of his dad methinks). Wrong. Without a free market settlement of the social contract, namely a liberal and american 'export' product, she would have had not even the right to save one cent and she would have had either no wage at all to boast about or a wage of 10 dollars a month for working one's ass off 16 hours a day and a rusty rifle to go to shoot on the civilians when the President Milosevic would say to her that they are getting troublesome and need to be sent to the Camps immediately...
This imprint is still all with me. Every day.
http://www.unitedscripters.com/sep11.html
sept11.html
I meant not sep11. But that's not important. It's just with me. I feel it, that's what I mean.
"what?"
"rve it"
"what?"
"Deserve it. Deserve it."
Those who remember the movie will remember the quote.
I'm trying.