discontinuity and remembrance

[katster]

The tale of the tape, so to speak, is in my livejournal. Here are my entries for 9/11/01. (And the next few days are filled with more reactions.)

The thing I find most interesting, looking back on this eight years later, is the sudden and abrupt change from what passes from normality (from the entry posted at 1:30 AM PDT) to the total shock six hours later. I’d later describe it that month as a discontinuity — where the graph suddenly jumps, leaving a gap in the line. And that’s really what it was to me. New York is far away from California, so, other than a few close calls, my only real connection with the incident was either friends of friends or a fellow alum of UC Berkeley showing his courage in helping to yank a plane from the sky somewhere near Pittsburgh.

So, in some ways, I feel like it’s not my anniversary to memorialize. It was a bad thing, definitely. It caused a discontinuity on the graph of our lives. But, in the end, except in grand scales that I barely comprehend, it didn’t touch me. Between that and the way things have played out in the intervening years, it’s lead me to that awkward position.

I suppose it’s a moment like the Kennedy assassination, when, as Peter Gabriel put it so well in his song “Family Snapshot”, “Peak time viewing blown in a flash/ as I burn into your memory cells.” If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you know exactly the creeping moment when you first saw those pictures and realized that there was a discontinuity in your personal timeline and you will probably never forget it again.

And that’s about all I have to say about that. I’ll go hang the flag before I go to the Social Security office today, though.

Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Without seeking to diminish the magnitude and tragedy of that event, the fact that the UK had suffered systematic terrorist bombings throughout the previous three decades (many of which were partially funded by US residents) seemed to give us a slightly different perspective.

[katster.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, I grant that. Also, I think there's a lot of "oh, we're the US, everybody likes us" that was shattered that day. I think, in the end, it messed the US more than most of us care to admit, but that's neither here nor there. There was a certain sense of normality -- at least for the US -- that things like this just don't happen.

In the UK, your normality is different, as you went through that experience. It's the same conversation I have with Israeli friends, actually. And in some ways, it's like dealing with earthquakes here in California -- put it in the back of your head that it might happen, and then do your best to forget about it as you go through your day to day activities. (And I might be approaching metaphor fail here, so I'm going to stop right there.)

Also, I'd like to think I've learned something in eight years. Some of that stuff definitely reflects a different me. :)

-kat