The
World Trade Center Disaster
All Our
Worlds
written by B originally for Whatever-Dude.com on september 13th - 2001
Full text at Archive.org
New York City has always been sort of a "promised land" for me. Back when it was completely selfish and materialistic it was because there are actually things to do there...clubs to go to, sights to see, small tightly knit groups of sassy young metropolitan women looking for intercourse and the subsequent girl talk that would ensue, sports arenas, everything. I live, and have unfortunately (give or take a few months) always lived, right in the middle of Virginia. I'm too far away from Norfolk one way, too far away from Washington DC the other way, and too far away from Charlotte to the South to have anything resembling a "fun weekend." Most people 'round here's idea of a fun weekend is to close their eyes and sway their hands around in the air while fat guys in business suits and their bouffant-laden housewives sing hymns about salvation and how gross it is to be gay. Suffice to say I've been looking for a way out for a while.
I don't need a giant castle and predictable rides based on popular animated motion pictures or a comic shop on a Saturday night to be in a place full of "magic." Magic to me has always been about atmosphere, about being able to reach out my hands and touch and feel something that someone I admire has reached out and touched and felt. I got the feeling in the Babe Ruth museum in Baltimore, standing in the doorway to the room where he was born, feeling that chill of a life long since important still lingering in the cracked wallpaper and dusty old sheets. I got the feeling standing at Abraham Lincoln's feet in the Lincoln Memorial, partially because of all the emotion that went into building such an amazing sculpture for a man who wrapped his bleeding hands around the rope and dragged our nation through a Civil War, and partially because Jimmy Stewart always makes me cry there in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
The last time I remember having that feeling was every single moment I've ever touched the dirty ground in New York City. I've only been there once -- during a senior class field trip, which I guess was to show us that we need to set our sights higher than the sixteen dozen churches and convenience stores in Lynchburg. Every moment of that trip still feels like a dream, even the uncomfortable ones like me sleeping on a shelf because our school crammed way too many people in a two bed hotel room. I can remember skipping down Broadway with my hands in my pockets, watching hundreds of teenage girls clamoring to catch a piece of one of the Hansons on their way in to do Letterman. I can remember waving to Andy Richter in the NBC studios building and feeling like being the only person in the room to recognize him brightened his day. Most of all I can remember standing in the little alcove outside of Madison Square Garden, with my chin resting on a slab of concrete all too uncomfortable, and realizing how happy I was to be alive.
I am not ashamed to say that my third or fourth favorite person in the entire world is Madison Square Garden. It is a building that manifests every dream, aspiration, and goal I could ever imagine. It's the place where the New York Rangers, by all accounts the worst hockey team possible with Earth's gravity, by all accounts a team that the Mighty Ducks could give a run for their money (and I'm not talking about Anaheim either, I'm talking Charlie, Goldberg, Emilio Estevez, and that crackhead who can hit the powerful slapshot), brought home the Stanley Cup in 94. It's the place where Jeff Hardy ripped his shirt off, flashed the suicide guns, and swanton bombed D-Von Dudley through a table from the balcony to win the first ever tag team tables match. If I could live in a pup tent with my stoner friends on the sidewalk outside the garden and videotape up my nose about how "sorry I was" I would gladly do it. To me, the place, right there in the heart of New York, represents everything that is good in the world.
And the world, as it turns out, isn't very good after all.
I woke up on Tuesday morning standing approximately three inches from the television, squinting to see without my contact lenses. There was a giant flaming world trade center tower, and the other one was just...gone. Maybe I'm weird, but the most unbelievable thing about the whole attack to me is that the buildings are just gonna be gone now. It's like remembering your grandfather but not being able to place his face. It's a sick feeling, a feeling of hopelessness and loss for something you never had. It makes you sit there, with your feet crossed, hoping that Freddy Krueger would hop in and, for once, make everything better. If it had all been a dream it would've been a killer visual.
But it wasn't a dream...at least not yet. Whoever's dreaming this should go ahead and wake up so the rest of us can go back to having minds that don't race and strain and miss.
All the lame popular culture references that I should be applying to things like Burgertime video games or the Urkel Dance are all hitting me, one after another, like waves. I feel like Bambi and my mother just told me that man has entered the forest, or like George Bailey at the end of his rope, staring down into the icy water and wondering if it would just be easier not to be around anymore. I feel like Jem from To Kill a Mockingbird, finally being able to realize that there is evil in this world that affects me directly, by watching simple Tom Robinson become an "excuse." New York City is my Tom Robinson, because I'm too insignificant to help it survive.
I spent the day going "Oh my God, I hope Jen is okay" and "Oh my God, I hope Dave is okay," and for once in my life my emotions weren't so concerned with the general populous as it was with two of my best friends in the whole world. I can laugh about stupid teenagers in trenchcoats blasting away at chicks with metal fishies on their car without regret, or make jokes about Aaliyah not being able to "pick herself up and try again" and not feel bad about it, because they have no relevance to my life. I can't go back and edit my mind and say "oh, you're evil for thinking that" because I'm not...the only way I've ever been able to deal with something on a scale like that has been to make bad jokes about it, and hope that my friends know that they're just bad jokes. I can't remember having malicious intent in my whole life, but I can't keep myself from making stupid jokes and I hate myself for it...a good example would be all the times I've hit "backspace backspace backspace backspace" to get rid of all the Jessica Simpson and "Mad About You" jokes.
Why do I backspace those jokes now? Because I almost understand this one.
It's not like getting shot in your school for believing in God. It's not like a musician burning up in a plane crash because they overloaded it with camera equipment and suitcases. It's not even like Oklahoma City. It affects me personally this time. And you know why I don't feel so bad about that, or feel like a hypocrite because of that?
Because it's doing the same thing to the rest of us.
If I'd been Aaliyah's brother or the cousin of somebody who worked in the Oklahoma City disaster or the guy who printed up all the T-shirts for Cassie Bernall's family so they could make money off their dead daughter I would feel this way about each situation. But when somebody pilots and airplane into the heart of our very world and leaves nothing standing...it's not an "act of war" or a "terrorist attack" anymore. It's like Osama Bin Laden is lifting up the ends of our tables and dumping school lunch all over our clothes for no reason at all, while we were just sitting around talking about Star Trek. It's a slap in the face of everybody who's ever dreamed of something better.
Whether you're American or not doesn't matter -- even in Pearl Harbor they bombed an Air Force base, and not a giant building full of people who weren't doing anything to anyone. We can't go say "KILL THE FUCKEN RAG HEADS OMFG THOSE DUNE BUGGIES ARE GONNA DIE" because we don't know if they're even behind it. Sure, they're dancing in the streets and cheering for pain and suffering, but if I've seen any Indiana Jones movie I know that they're usually doing that anyway. It's the same idea that I will stand up and cheer when Christian gives "The One" Billy Gunn a one-man con-chair-to...because I HATE Billy Gunn, and even though I had nothing to do with Christian's decision I still applaud it. Those guys hate us, and I think it's common knowledge that even if we gave them golden hookers full of money and candy they would feel the same way.
So don't blame anybody yet. Wait until a guy in a turban shows up on television pointing his finger and proclaiming (specifically, at least) that his Jihad against America is on. Then we can have all the jokes about nuking them until their sand is glowing green. That's when we can break out the Space Wars satellites and giant laser-toting robots to fly over there and Air Slash them to death. I'm in no position to ask anything of anyone, but for anyone who has ever read something I've written or talked to me, remember this:
Those towers went up in the first place because of dreams, and
they went down carrying 10,000 dreams with them. For right now,
if one of those dreams were yours, sit with your face in your
hands and cry...because it's all right. In times like this you
are supposed to. Grab the Jen's of your life, the Dave's of your
life, hold them close to you as much as you can and tell them how
much you appreciate them. Because eventually something will be
built in the place of the towers, and a whole new set of dreams
will rise up into the sky and give stupid yokels from the
backwoods like myself something to believe in.
