I suppose, in a way, I'm not as angry as some people. I don't know why. Maybe I'm still too numb.
I just keep finding myself hoping that they find absolute conclusive overwhelming evidence of who the individual people who planned this are, who their associates are, who funded them ... and that they kill the people who did it. Quickly, cleanly. I know, that sounds like revenge. That sounds like anger. But it isn't.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that they catch each and every one of the people who planned this, who funded it, who helped. Just capture them, and nothing more. Let's assume that they bring them back to the United States for trial.
Where, in this entire country, could they receive anything even pretending to be a fair trial?
Look, for example, at Nichols, the convicted associate of McVeigh in the bombing at Oklahoma City. He was sentenced to several life terms ... but that wasn't enough for Oklahoma. They don't feel that he's paid enough of a price. They're demanding that the federal government send him to Oklahoma to face state charges that will result in his death. And whether you're a death penalty advocate or opponent, how can you feel other than that he deserves this somehow? That someone who planned the deaths of so many shouldn't somehow be dead himself?
And if we think that perhaps Oklahoma has cause to feel that way, how much more should the rest of the country feel that way about the planners and associates and bankers of this atrocity?
But ... does that mean that, in the end, justice is nothing more than vengeance? Is that all there is to it?
But I digress .... I think.
Take it broader. At the moment, almost everyone in the entire world is outraged. Where, on this planet, under whatever judicial system you desire, could they receive anything pretending to be a fair trial?
So I don't want the associates and the bankers of this evil to die because I want revenge on them. I can't conceive of any revenge we could take upon them that would ever be enough. Maybe if you could kill them and then bring them back to life and do it again, until they had died once each time for each and every one of the dead and the injured, and once each time for each and every one of the families left bereft by this ... maybe, just maybe that would be enough.
And if it was enough, it would be too much. It would be far too much.
I don't know how we can punish them enough and still preserve something of ourselves that we need to keep, to believe in.
And consider: what if we never find THEM, whoever THEM is?
Consider: the governments of the world have been running around arresting people frantically since the attack. But most of the ones the US has arrested have been released and the ones the Europeans are arresting are mostly involved in unrelated conspiracies. (Which is enough to give pause all by itself.)
Pundits and commentators and analysts have said that there MUST have been major funding behind this, that there MUST be a very rich person or a country that caused this to happen. But what if they're wrong? What if those people came here with their own money, their faked documents -- you don't need any special affiliation for that -- and did everything they did on their own. If they've been working at one job or another since they've been here, or if any of them was perhaps independently wealthy on their own, then they needed no backing. Nobody needed to help them.
What if, when all is said and done and investigated and searched out ... what if we discover that the ones who committed the actual acts are all there is? Where do we turn our anger, our rage, our desire for revenge if that turns out to be the case?
What then?
After a few minutes, it begins to get lighter and easier to see; the air thins a bit. The occasional police officer waves us towards the FDR Drive. They seem casual, business-like. We walk. We clamber over barriers. I hop awkwardly over a divider, still for some reason concerned about my mini, when I feel it on my shoulders -- heat, heaviness.
It's the sun. The sun is out. The sun is out?
The sun is out. The sun hasn't turned on the TV today.
---Sarah Bunting, "For Thou Art With Us", Tomato Nation, September 14, 2001
I keep waiting for it all to stop. For it all to end so that we can go on. And it keeps unfolding, nightmare without end.
I keep running into reminders and after-effects in odd ways and unexpected places.
Discovering that more than one friend lived much, much closer than I'd known. I have no idea what the geography of Manhattan is like, you see, where anything is.
Finding out that someone had been in danger only when I receive an email saying, "I'm all right!" They'd moved to the city only a month ago; in the normal press of life, I'd completely forgotten. So I hadn't known they'd been near the towers that day, until I got the message saying they were OK.
Hearing that a friend had left the city only the day before. That he'd been nearby earlier on the day he left.
Discovering that someone with whom I've corresponded, if rather peripatetically, was actually there during it all. I thought she would be in Canada a few weeks longer.
In smaller ways ... going out, seeing one of the city's homeless selling a Streetwise newspaper -- prepared a week or two ahead of sale date -- buying one only to discover one of the festivals that's been cancelled because the city felt it would be inappropriate to celebrate.
Finally being forced to either listen to music on headphones or watch nothing but the Cartoon Network just to make the news stop, for at least a little while.
The last day or so, I've been avoiding television news. In part because, once the big picture stories of the day are done, they start showing how individuals were affected, the up-close and personal stories ... and the personal stories are utterly unbearable. In part because of their unceasing replay of the crashes and the fall of the towers. As I've mentined elsewhere, Television news seems, in some odd and remote way, to be incapable of understanding that it's disturbing to watch that horror, over and over again, in slow motion, in regular motion, in living color, in animated cross section ... they find it fascinating, and seem to think that most of us do, as well. I suppose it's possible, but everyone I know finds it too painful to even watch again. Television doesn't seem to understand the cumulative effect of all this, that it can anger, that it can make us a little manic, a little paranoid, more than a little insane ... or maybe they do understand. Maybe, for some reason, this is what they want. I don't know.
Newspapers and news web sites are, in some ways, hardly better. At first, I tried looking only at the overview stories, then jumping to Business or Technology or Entertainment or Sports. After all, there would be profound affects in these areas, things that would have a pronounced effect in many aspects of our daily lives. But here as well, there were stories of individuals, of people that were devastating and hard to read. The death of a company's founder. Of a show's producer. Phone calls. The story of the Cantor Fitzgerald firm is a naked horror. (One which, for some reason, ABC saw fit to broadcast on the nightly news, on Nightline, in the morning on Good Morning America ... and now the BBC World Service has picked it up. It's a powerful story, one that brings home the human cost ... but it is agony to watch and scarcely easier to read.)
And yet ... and yet through it all, the sentiment builds, story after story. You can't read or listen to or watch all of this without becoming angry, without wanting someone to pay. But ... the people who actually committed the crimes themselves are all dead. Gone. Beyond our reach. We don't know who helped them as yet. And so we turn inward. And it's ugly and it's growing and as it builds, what keeps running through my head is an old David Bowie song, of all things -- thoroughly maudlin -- again and again: This is not America ... No! This is not!...
But it is.
It's only understandable that we're all a bit crazy right now.
Perhaps later, when the rubble is gone, when those dead who can be identified and buried have been put to rest, when whatever ceremonies are done over the site for those who can't be ... perhaps by then, we'll all be sane again.
One can only hope.
There must be a way to use this agony as a path to a kinder, better world. I don't know how, but we must use this experience to benefit our children. We must find a way to put our anger and outrage aside in the name of a civilized world where we all can live in peace and respect for each other.
Gene Amole, "We must spare children horror", Rocky Mountain News (Denver), September 12, 2001
december 13, 2000
a tale of reasons
july 9, 2000
a tale of true tales
april 2, 2000
a tale of rights and wrongs
february 2, 2000:
the first tale of lost children
january 24, 2000:
the tale of words
january 23, 2000:
the tale of belonging
january 22, 2000:
the tale of the lost city
