09.13.01
Yesterday, I decided that I was done talking about the terrorism and the aftermath. I decided that instead of writing about it here, I would relate gross out stories, like yesterday's fine paean to vomiting up oranges on the school bus.
However, today I found myself being angrily berated by a complete stranger for replying to a friend of mine that I had been so heavily bombarded with information and speculation to process from every media source, and every living person's constant need to discuss and dissect the incidents, that I was starting to become numb to it all, and that I almost didn't care right now.
Some guy, walking past, shook his fist and yelled at me, "You better care!"
I replied that of course I cared, but that I was just tired and overwhelmed.
He gave me a dirty look and walked away from the two of us.
I've been avoiding the media for the past several days, and with good reason.
Right now, everything that has happened, the buildings and the planes and the people, they are all still just abstracts.
It's like the Holocaust -- you think about millions of people being killed in the most horrible ways imaginable and you know that it is horrible, and you know that that it is a huge number of people, but unless you actually see all of the faces and names, and see their living and dying conditions, you don't realize the sheer horror of it all. You can appreciate and be horrified by it, but you can't really understand.
Most people are thinking right now about big buildings, filled with people, that were destroyed. They're thinking about planes, filled with people, falling from the sky. They're thinking about the people inside the planes and buildings as an anomalous abstract quantity of life that has been extinguished.
As actual numbers, and names and faces and touching stories are attached to each of those numbers, things will become more concrete, more real.
Think about every cashier, clerk, and sale associate that has ever waited on you in the past 30 years (pretend you're thirty with me now). Now, imagine if they all died. That's the kind of volume of people that we're talking about with the most currently perpetrated atrocities.
I don't think that the human mind was meant to comprehend the destruction of anything on that scope, scale, range, or degree of magnitude.
And every minute the media is throwing new truth and gossip at us, retracting half of it moments later.
There's a bomb, there's not a bomb.
It was all a hoax, it was the God's honest truth.
White is black, no wait, black is white.
I can't wrap my brain about that sort of dissemination of information.
And I having a very difficult time accepting a system of belief that places a greater value on the perpetuation of some fundamental ideal than on human life.
To quote Ghandi, "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
I have a enough stress and problems in living my own life, I can't try and live for the thousands of people that have died this week. I will remember them, honor them, and respect them, but I cannot live for them. Maybe that makes me selfish, but the most I can do it try to get on with my own life, try to rebuild what I can, and continue to experience things and grow as a person.
