On saying nothing

I didn’t comment on 9-11, or Patriots Day or whatever it’s being called. It makes me so uncomfortable I can barely stand to think about it. Not the events of that day, mind you. I recall them as vividly as if they had just happened, and the disbelief and anger and sadness sometimes make me sit down hard, like getting punched in the stomach. I am certain that it will be to my generation what the Kennedy Assasination was to my parents. All of us will remember exactly where we were until the day we die. I didn’t say anything about the anniversary for a couple of reasons.

One is simple. I don’t think we’ve gotten anywhere.

Nationally, we’re as selfish as ever. I spent the evening of 9-11 getting a lot of people who had just been at a parade drunk, and watched them behave rudely to me and to each other. People still give me the finger on the highway, and I don’t drive THAT badly. I overheard someone use the word nigger about 2 days afterwords. I have ample reason to hate that kind of thinking, now more than ever. What happened to pulling together? Ever since that day, sadly, all I think about is how many people said to themselves afterwords, Wow,I bet I can make a killing selling flags on the roadside. I think most of the patriotic behavior I have seen in posturing, and it hurts me. One can never know the true intentions of strangers, and I hope I am wrong.

Globally, we have done nothing but jab a stick into a hornet’s nest. “The War on Terrorism” hasn’t eased tension or made anyone safer. Afghanistan is now in the hands of someone else thanks to us, but terror still has its roots there, and in Pakistan, and in Isreal and Palestine. We’ve suddenly shifted to Iraq, which seems like simply an excuse to settle an old grudge. I don’t understand why the world is convinceed that to solve the problem of terror we have to kill people, that to settle our religious, political, or ideological differences, the best thing to do is kill each other. We’ve been killing each other in the name of God for at least four centuries. This seems to be a paradox of such gargantuan proprotions as to be unmissable, but clearly its not.

The second reason I didn’t comment is even simpler. Zuzia was in India, right next door to all of this and due to arrive home only three days before the big anniversary. I was worried, no matter how much she told me not to be. The last thing I wanted to think about then was her not coming back because of all of this, like 3000 other families had to learn to live with last year.

And now, thank God, she’s home.