I thought StumbleUpon would help me find something to blog about, because I felt like blogging. And it did. I found the most moving footage of 9/11 I have ever seen. No newscasters, nothing oozing with patriotism, just raw footage by a family from their apartment 500 yds away. I include it here, but I warn you if you intend to watch it: It’s long, and it is gutting. Here it is: http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=47f7nkuk3x
I was 11 when that happened. I was a 6th grader coming back from spending agri-science class outside looking at trees. I was a kid who kept hearing every adult within range say that nothing like that had ever happened in the history of the United States. I had heard people describe their “Kennedy moment,” where they were and what they were doing when they heard Kennedy had been shot. This was my “Kennedy moment,” except bigger, more historical. I’m furious when I remember I was actually proud to be alive when this happened, so I could tell the next generation about my “9/11 moment.” When you are 11, this sense of importance appeals to you. When you are 11, you think you understand everything, even if no one around you does. I told everyone I understood, despite their urgings that I couldn’t possibly. When you are 11, you think you don’t need anyone’s guidance. When you are 11, you’re blind.
When you are 19, you’re blind. You still don’t know a damned thing. But hopefully by then you know you don’t know a damned thing. The actual scope of all of the things you really don’t and never will be able to understand should be a bit clearer. When you are 19, you should know that you’ll never understand another human being completely, that you’ll never even understand yourself completely. When you are 19, you should know that there is no such thing as an innocent person, but there is no such thing as a purely evil person, but there are millions of different stages in between. When you are 19, you should know the events of the world are never black and white, they have millions upon billions of little things making them up.
But when you are 11, you never fully grasp the extent of the things you can’t grasp. You never try. You just plow headlong through the world and accept all things for face value. And I did that. The 9/11 attacks could be summed up by 11 year old me as follows: Terrorists attacked. A lot of people died. We should kill whoever did it.
I felt almost no sympathy for the people who were lost because it hadn’t really affected me. It was hundreds of miles away. Outside the sun was shining and it was going to be a beautiful day. We wouldn’t have to do work because our teachers are letting us watch T.V. How could today be so bad? It just didn’t make sense, not to a 6th grader.
I used to think that the world would make sense when I was older. It does, it makes total sense. We’re all just a bunch of fools. We’re all ridiculous fools. When we are 11 we are fools for thinking we aren’t, when we are 19 we are fools for knowing we are but doing nothing about it, and when we are even older we are fools again for encouraging the fool inside of us. We build gigantic buildings, monuments and testaments to the willpower and strength of the human race, of the human mind. And then we knock each other’s buildings down. We think up new bombs and new guns and new ways to destroy the things those before us devoted themselves to creating, and we’re all just damned fools because of it.
This isn’t about war, it isn’t about politics, or society, or anything like that. It is about humanity as a whole. It is about how deep down inside of us there is something unnatural. Competition is a natural thing, but we have crossed the line of being competitive, and we have crossed it running. We are our own worst enemy. We know this, yet we press on with our own self-destruction. A race hell-bent on suicide, explain that to Mother Nature. Let me know whether she laughs or cries.
I hope it is the latter, but I wouldn’t blame her for the former. How do you watch such a ridiculous race without cracking a smile, even a smile at our hopelessness?
How do you watch people deliberately crash a plane into a building in order to kill without finding yourself trying to rationalize it in your own 11 year old way? You don’t, you must rationalize. You must dumb it down, you must dilute the impact and the importance of what you see. I have studied so many tragedies since, and they have impacted me so much more than the one major human tragedy that I could consider being “close to home.” But I watch it again now, and I cannot dumb it down anymore. It’s humanized now, and I’m glad. It’s one less thing, of the trillions of things, that I am completely blind or numb to. And the world still makes sense, we’re all still just damned fools.
May all of those people who were lost on that day, may all of the people in the history of the world that have been lost to human stupidity, rest in peace.
