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Infamous Day
This morning, before I woke up, I was having a terribly unsettling dream.
It gets really windy on the island, and the dream was like that. It started out being about something else, but then in my dream the wind started picking up, at first just bad, then an unbearable gale. I was inside, looking through my sliding glass doors, at this incredibly strong wind sweeping everything aside. It blew my car's doors open and was sweeping away all of my important papers and things from inside it. Everything was desperately out of control.
Then, I woke up to the phone ringing, and Adam telling me to turn on the news, because a real nightmare was happening.
I'm not a huge believer in prophetic dreams, and I won't speculate whether this dream was meant to be "telling" me anything, or if it was just random synapses firing off in my head; but there was something oddly appropriate about this dream. It was a dream about welling panic, ineffectual horror, it echoed the helplessness I felt all day as I kept watching a little black plane-shaped speck smash into a building in a cloud of fire and destroy thousands of lives.
I watched the news for almost two hours, and talked to Adam on the phone for a lot of it. We didn't really talk, actually. We mostly just kept saying "Oh my God," over and over to each other.
I eventually shuffled into work, just to be physically near people. It helped some, but it was hard to see people going about doing things as if nothing happened, or trying to be forcefully cheerful, or trying to talk about it without really saying anything. Later in the day the development guys had their usual ultimate frisbee game. I felt too sick to join in. I don't really blame them for playing, I suppose, but for me, playing a game seemed really inappropriate. There didn't seem to be any "official" acknowledgement of it within the company, although people were talking about it. I think that really disappointed me, especially as I work for a Christian company.
I spent most of the time on the net, talking to people on IRC or instant messaging. I talked to some people on the east coast, even in New York. I tried to keep a news stream going, although all the news servers were really bogged down. I had no access to a tv at work, so between the bandwidth/server issues and that, I missed some of the worst of the peripheral footage: the crash in PA, the fanatic Palestinians dancing in the streets, people jumping out of the WTC towers. I heard about all of it, though.
I woke up to this day in a daze and stayed in that daze all day long. My brain doesn't know what to think yet other than "This is really bad. And it's really real." My heart doesn't know how to feel all the horror that's been streaming into my eyes all day long. I won't speculate about why it happened, because there is no logic in terrorism. I won't speculate about the victims or their families, because I doubt I could ever grasp their immense suffering. I know bad things happen every day-- crimes, wars, violence-- I can't pretend I didn't know my illusions of safety in this country were anything other than illusions. But to see them shattered so viscerally, so renouncedly, continues to be a difficult, painful thing.
Everyone is responding with pain. Some are just shocked, like me. So many are angry, calling for justice and war, and it really worries me. I'm a pacifist, yes-- but I want justice too, and I'm not too idealistic to believe that this could or should be resolved without any kind of aggression. We certainly shouldn't allow terrorism to go unanswered. But we are becoming a country where vigilantism is a perfectly rational response to any wrong, especially a great wrong. This threat should be taken seriously, which means we must absolutely know the source of the threat, and that we must absolutely not count ourselves above our own laws when seeing justice done.
I'm scared, not just of the terrorist acts and the possibility of further attacks on my country, but also that once the immediate crisis is over and people are finished donating blood and are beginning to really grasp the immensity of what happened, that the worst in them, the unresolved pain and rage will win out and dictate our response as a people. I'm scared that my boyfriend who lives in Australia (and was supposed to be flying over here for a visit on Thursday) will be separated from me for a long time becauase we can no longer trust that a plane will make it here safely. Worse-- I fear that we may begin to fear any outside influence at all.
This is a completely new thing for my generation. The Cold War was dying out as I entered high school, and the aggressions that preceded it were beyond my comprehension. The only official war our country was involved in during my lifetime, in the Persian Gulf, was one of the most bloodless in our history. To see such an act in this age, when there was so much promise for further and further peace, was utterly shattering. All I can do is write, then hope I can sleep.
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