...Sooooo 9/11 totally happened

It is wierd because no one really seems to care anymore which is rather sad but it is also rather appropriate. My own feelings about the whole event are mixed and bizarre. On the grand scale of things Columbine had a much more noticable effect on the way I live my life than 9/11 did. I felt that attack far more and it effected me on a number of personal ways that, while are all very interesting, not the subject of this blog. 9/11, by contrast, sort of washed over me in this nonchalant wave. Thousands of people died and it really really sucked but the whole thing just failed to resonate with me. The day it happened I threw someone out of my room for waking me up while he was trying to tell me what happened. When I eventually woke up I came out watched the news for an hour then looked around at my friends and dorm mates. They were, stunned, some traumatized, some transfixed by the tv which had been repeating the same facts over and over again ever since the second tower fell.

I looked at these people and and the lack of information being spewed forth by the news and I declared that it is now movie time, and went and got something light from my room. The Usual Suspects. After that it was like a spell had been broken. They relaxed started to function again, and once the movie was over they checked the news, then we watched another movie. This progressed on wards until late into the night but that first inintial jolt. Man those guys really needed it.

Other people needed it too. People latter on were unable to leave their houses fear for they would miss some valuable piece of news that would some how make all of this make sense. Like litterally they didn't leave their houses for weeks, for some people it became a severe problem for some people. Of course going to collage has shown me that there are pleanty of people wandering around this country whoes parents did a shit job raising. But whateva.

I'm not one for retrospectives of major events. I've never done a columbine one, I don't even know when pearl harbor happened, and I only bearly celebrate my birthday. But hey this is diffrent, and I am not entirely sure why. I didn't do a lot to remember 9/11, mostly I watched part of the first season of Rescue Me.

I like that show and I LOVED the first season of it. The first season really seperated out the diffrences between us and them. These were all people who were actually there at ground zero pulling charred mangled bodies out of the wreckage. All the charecters in the show were fundamentally damaged by this event and as a result their ability to deal with the world around them was also fundamentally changed. They just wanted to go on with their lives and they couldn't. They were stuck, held down by the crushing weight by something so enormous that I can't even really comprehend it. And yet...yet these people were there for all of it.

I think one of my favorite episodes is when one of the firefighters went to a post traumatic stress group and discovered it was full of housewives who got scared of the tv. No one in the group was actually there, and they had no idea what post traumatic stress actually was. The way he chewed them out was fan-freaking-tastic.

Sadly later seasons start to fail. It becomes less about damaged people and more about sevearly bad people who have shit things happen to them. Its still good but it isn't like that first season. That first season tapped into a pulse, it was smart, funny, sad, and it collected the feeling of a unique moment in our history that you can't ever really understand, unless you were there. Of all the media to come out surrounding 9/11 that show got it the best.

They didn't make it about politics, or conspiracy theories, or any of that other shit that people try to make 9/11 about. Michael Moore is paticualry bad about this as he will just sort of throw around planes hitting a building because it makes his point better. The thing is that 9/11 wasn't about any of that.

It was about people. That day thousands upon thousands of people had the worst day of their lives. Its worth reflecting on.

I know that years from now people will forget about 9/11 just like I forget about the bombing of pearl harbor. Already people let the day pass without any real thought. Although I would rather that then it be turned into another shopping day, which would be extra fucking lame.

Alright I said my piece. Yep I reflected and everything. So I am moving on to a different topic. Mmmmyep