Monday, November 14, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Today
So YES! Here I am! I moved to New York, finally, and it was overall a pretty great life move, although I'm currently sleeping on an air mattress and using a cardboard box as a dresser. Some things I've witnessed include a Sunday evening Aussie bar fight, a guy on the corner who continually lights incense and urinates on the sidewalk, and subway rats the size of small horses. But more on that later.
Today, and the days previous, have been weird. I say this not because there are actual puddles of human waste outside my apartment building, but because my new home has been, and for good reason, very tangibly fearful. Checkpoints on every avenue, bridge, and tunnel. Police EVERYWHERE. Friends fleeing the city. I walked out of work last night and the streets were empty. I don't consider myself a person who worries to the point of panic, but the panic: it was there.
In addition to losing my shit over the possibility of grave bodily harm, I couldn't help but worry about the potential fallout: another ten years of cleanup, of bickering, of mourning, of political strong-arming. Another ten years of trying to make sense of an act of violence that defies sensibility.
I was crazy young ten years ago. Thirteen is not an age where a kid can process events of this scale and have it come out as anything but painfully bad, angsty poetry. (Which is a thing that happened, and no, you won't be reading it, although it is the stuff of legend.) And despite the best efforts of the adults in my life, they had no idea how to make the attacks comprehensible for our generation. How could they, really?
We spent that day in a state of relative ignorance and confusion. Our French 1 teacher--bless her soul--stuck to her 100%-immersion guns and told us about the first plane in French, so we had no idea what was going on. We saw a lot of teachers looking grim and even crying, so we could only assume that aliens had taken over Washington, D.C. It wasn't until the last class of the day that our social studies teacher closed the door, asked us politely to stop talking and sit quietly, and informed us that he was going to show us what was happening on CNN--despite the directive he'd received from the administrators--because we were all adults and deserved to know. That was the first time in my life that an adult talked to me as a peer, and after we saw the footage of the towers collapsing, the first time in my life that I regretted that transition.
I remember the following months as a confusing mix of adult expectations and childish impotence. I did my best to live up to the remarkable fact that I was, in fact, an adult now, but there were many things that were happening that I had a not-so-great feeling about and had absolutely no authority to change: the passage of the Patriot Act, the bombing of Afghanistan, big dudes with bigger guns at the airport, the uncritical and mandatory singing of "Proud to Be an American" at school assemblies.
Sometimes I feel that our generation should have been given more say in decisions that were made following the attacks. Sometimes I remember what a numbskull I was at age thirteen and I feel pretty strongly that teenagers shouldn't be able to make decisions about breakfast cereal, let alone foreign policy.
This is hard to admit, but for the last ten years, resentment was the primary emotion that I associated with 9/11. It looks really selfish and disgusting in print, but there it is. I was so angry about having this responsibility thrust upon me and not being permitted to do anything with it that I neglected all the honest-to-God heroism that was happening in the margins.
There were firefighters and police officers and civilians and cleanup workers who risked life and limb to help their fellow men and women. And then there were people who just did their best to love us kids and make us feel safe, even though they didn't know if we were all going to wake up tomorrow.
There are many kinds of heroes, and they all deserve our gratitude. That's what I'm focusing on today.
And despite all the emotional craziness of this weekend, and how strange it is to be getting settled in a place where things are presently so unsettling, I feel very lucky to be here. Here's to you, New York. Let's do this.
Today, and the days previous, have been weird. I say this not because there are actual puddles of human waste outside my apartment building, but because my new home has been, and for good reason, very tangibly fearful. Checkpoints on every avenue, bridge, and tunnel. Police EVERYWHERE. Friends fleeing the city. I walked out of work last night and the streets were empty. I don't consider myself a person who worries to the point of panic, but the panic: it was there.
In addition to losing my shit over the possibility of grave bodily harm, I couldn't help but worry about the potential fallout: another ten years of cleanup, of bickering, of mourning, of political strong-arming. Another ten years of trying to make sense of an act of violence that defies sensibility.
I was crazy young ten years ago. Thirteen is not an age where a kid can process events of this scale and have it come out as anything but painfully bad, angsty poetry. (Which is a thing that happened, and no, you won't be reading it, although it is the stuff of legend.) And despite the best efforts of the adults in my life, they had no idea how to make the attacks comprehensible for our generation. How could they, really?
We spent that day in a state of relative ignorance and confusion. Our French 1 teacher--bless her soul--stuck to her 100%-immersion guns and told us about the first plane in French, so we had no idea what was going on. We saw a lot of teachers looking grim and even crying, so we could only assume that aliens had taken over Washington, D.C. It wasn't until the last class of the day that our social studies teacher closed the door, asked us politely to stop talking and sit quietly, and informed us that he was going to show us what was happening on CNN--despite the directive he'd received from the administrators--because we were all adults and deserved to know. That was the first time in my life that an adult talked to me as a peer, and after we saw the footage of the towers collapsing, the first time in my life that I regretted that transition.
I remember the following months as a confusing mix of adult expectations and childish impotence. I did my best to live up to the remarkable fact that I was, in fact, an adult now, but there were many things that were happening that I had a not-so-great feeling about and had absolutely no authority to change: the passage of the Patriot Act, the bombing of Afghanistan, big dudes with bigger guns at the airport, the uncritical and mandatory singing of "Proud to Be an American" at school assemblies.
Sometimes I feel that our generation should have been given more say in decisions that were made following the attacks. Sometimes I remember what a numbskull I was at age thirteen and I feel pretty strongly that teenagers shouldn't be able to make decisions about breakfast cereal, let alone foreign policy.
This is hard to admit, but for the last ten years, resentment was the primary emotion that I associated with 9/11. It looks really selfish and disgusting in print, but there it is. I was so angry about having this responsibility thrust upon me and not being permitted to do anything with it that I neglected all the honest-to-God heroism that was happening in the margins.
There were firefighters and police officers and civilians and cleanup workers who risked life and limb to help their fellow men and women. And then there were people who just did their best to love us kids and make us feel safe, even though they didn't know if we were all going to wake up tomorrow.
There are many kinds of heroes, and they all deserve our gratitude. That's what I'm focusing on today.
And despite all the emotional craziness of this weekend, and how strange it is to be getting settled in a place where things are presently so unsettling, I feel very lucky to be here. Here's to you, New York. Let's do this.
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