Remember September

Instead of posting lately, I spent hours playing “Gardens of Time” on facebook. While whiling away time making my dream garden and playing games, I created a wasteland of my personal time, dawdling, not cleaning, not writing, and not adding to my tiny legacy if I happen to get hit by an asteroid tomorrow.  I confess, I am weak and lazy in many respects.

I have decided that I will have one FB holiday per week–and to stick to it.  I gave myself one yesterday–but broke my promise.  Today, and half of tomorrow, I will be off the FB bandwagon.

Giving more time to write in tangents and bore my two readers.  By the by, hey Mom and Dad.  We’ll be booking plane tickets this week for the end of November.

I will also get back on the bandwagon of writing every day–even if it might be 1am, to do it, like brushing my teeth twice a day.

Alas, the post I am writing about is remembering how the world changed ten years ago yesterday.  I remember I started grad school in journalism.  I just moved to Boulder, and my roommate asked me if she could use my television–we didn’t have cable and I had the only tv in the house.

She told me the United States was under attack, and wanted to see the coverage.  We couldn’t get reception, so I hiked over to campus, to find out what was really happening.  American under attack?  Are you kidding me?!  She was smoking too much pot.

I hustled into the journalism school to find out what was really going on.  At that moment, I witnessed both Towers toppled to the ground live on CNN.   I sat amongst a room full of strangers, dumbstruck–both unwilling to believe the tragedy I couldn’t deny.

I saw WTC fall on reloops throughout the day, journalist and other witnesses who barely escaped with their lives, family members wandering the streets and accosting reporters for help in finding the missing.  I also saw footage of people dancing in the streets in Pakistan and Iran.

I wanted to reach through the screen and choke those dancers.  A foreign classmate stood by me, and agreed it was a very sad day.  She then said that in her country, bombings were not uncommon occurrences–people wound die because of politics masked in religious ideology.  Americans showed little interest in people with the same plight, and were more focused on the little nothings and taking their safety and security for granted.  Meanwhile, we did quite a bit of pissing off the rest of the world–and it was unfortunately a matter of time for America’s veil of  illusions would be lifted.  Still, it was a very sad day.

After the Towers fell, our word changed.  Many things change, just on the basis of time.  I have more gray hare, a wedding ring, and a child.  I live in Baltimore instead of Boulder, and I returned to social work after completing my MA in journalism.  It’s the natural order of things to change over time.

Yet 9/11 started a series of events that we as a country couldn’t turn back.  We couldn’t ignore our place in the world.  We couldn’t ignore the plight of others.  We–as a country–could no longer pursue our own material wants while willfully disregarding the needs of others.  We couldn’t take our safety and welfare for granted.

Ten years later,  Osama bin Laden was assassinated in Pakistan.  Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush. China and Vietnam enjoy the seductions of capitalism while communism whisper’s its swan song.

And something astonishing is happening in the Middle East, where we least expected it . . . Democracy is pushing forward–not by our own hands by pursuing liberty, justice, and the American way–but through everyday people taking to the streets and taking control of their own country.

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