Housebound

No, I haven't fallen again, but this wonderful Bizarro cartoon feels about right.  If I fall and get up, I just have the news to get up to...  Next time I fall into the dog bed, maybe I'll just stay there.

I'm getting tired of this "sick-ish" period Walt and I are going through.  The longer he deals with his condition the more depressed I see him become.  I can't put my finger on how long I've been dealing with this whatever-it-is, but long enough that it's starting to get real old.

It's being more or less housebound.  I can't remember the last time I was in a supermarket, but remember that I got weak and dizzy and could only handle half the store before leaving, so I'm not eager to go back.  This does save us tons of money on impulse purchases, of course.  I've also decided that Home Chef is becoming too much, so I've put it on hiatus indefinitely and we will go back to eating "something with chicken in it" for awhile.

Since I still can't drive, I can't just hop in the car and go somewhere.  Walt or Ned will take me wherever I want to go, but I'm not eager to spend lots of time at Atria and I haven't had lunch, one on one, with a friend in months.  (My friend Kathy and I missed discussion of the whole immigration crisis and separation of parents and kids.)  And watching Walt moving gingerly around the house, I feel bad asking him to drive me somewhere.

We saw one show on Friday and will see one on Saturday, but both of those are local and I have no plans to see a Sacramento show in the foreseeable future.  We decided not to go to the first film of the new IOOF film series because it just seemed too inconvenient for us to get there.

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Our memories of this day have always been a bit different from most people's.

We were checking into the obby of a hotel in London, when a woman rushed in and asked if anybody had seen anything the news about "something" happening at the World Trade Center in New York

This hotel got CNN and when we got in our room, I turned the tv on to see what was happening and saw the second tower collapse.

We spent the day glued to the TV until dinner time, when we went out to meet friends (from the US). I wandered the streets of London and the tube and listened vainly for an American accent.  I desperately needed to hear an American accent. At that time it was early enough that there weren't even any headlines in the tabloids.

We met Ellen and her husband at the restaurant and shared information we each had.  A nice couple of British ladies, hearing our accents, came over to our table and offered their condolences.

The next day we changed hotels and only had the BBC, so we didn't have any of the coverage from home and by this time newscasters were concentrating on the Brits who had been killed.  One newscaster said to another that now the Americans would "find out how we've been living for so long."

The cyber cafes were filled with Americans trying to make contact with people at home.

When we moved to Orkney at the end of the week, the news in the small town where we were staying did not make the front page, but was on the back page.

We returned to a country we didn't recognize, with flags flying everywhere and everyone suffering various stages of grief.

It wasn't until we went to New York a few years later and saw the notes saved on a hospital billboard and memorials stuck on a chain link fence that I got a full dose of the emotions that everyone had been feeling for so long.

The country came together in a very special way in the days after 9/11.  It's too bad we forgot that.

Another Thought on 9/11

A guy named Jim Wright posted comments on 9/11 that Facebook immediately deleted.  I think he has a point and decided to post his comments here:

You’re expecting some kind of obligatory 9-11 post, aren’t you?

Here it is, but you’re not gonna like it.

15 years ago today 19 shitheads attacked America.

They killed 3000 of us.

And then … America got its revenge for 9-11.

Yes we did. Many times over. We killed them. We killed them all. We killed their families. We killed their wives and their kids and all their neighbors. We killed whole nations that weren’t even involved just to make goddamned sure. We bombed their cities into rubble. We burned down their countries.

They killed 3000 of us, we killed 300,000 of them or more.

8000 of us came home in body bags, but we got our revenge. Yes we did.

We’re still here. They aren’t.

We win. USA! USA! USA!

Right?

You goddamned right. We. Win.

Except…

Every year on this day we bath in the blood of that day yet again. We watch the towers fall over and over. It’s been 15 goddamned years, but we just can’t get enough. We’ve just got to watch it again and again.

It’s funny how we never show those videos of the bombs falling on Baghdad today. Or the dead in the streets of Afghanistan. We got our revenge, but we never talk about that today. No, we just sit and watch the towers fall yet again.

Somewhere out there on the bottom of the sea are the rotting remains of the evil son of bitch who masterminded the attack. It took a decade, but we hunted him down and put a bullet in his brain. Sure. We got him. Right? That’s what we wanted. that’s what our leaders promised us, 15 years ago today.

And today those howling the loudest for revenge shrug and say, well, yeah, that. That doesn’t matter, because, um, yeah, the guy in the White House, um, see, well, he’s not an American, he’s the enemy see? He’s not doing enough. So, whatever. What about that over there? And that? And…

Yeah.

15 years ago our leaders, left and right, stood on the steps of the Capitol and gave us their solemn promise to work together, to stand as one, for all Americans.

How’d that promise work out?

How much are their words worth? Today, 15 years later?

It’s 15 years later and we’re STILL afraid. We’re still terrorized. Still wallowing in conspiracy theories and peering suspiciously out of our bunkers at our neighbors. Sure we won. Sure we did. We became a nation that tortures our enemies — and our own citizens for that matter. We’re a nation of warrantless wiretaps and rendition and we’ve gotten used to being strip searched in our own airports. And how is the world a better place for it all?

And now we’re talking about more war, more blood.

But, yeah, we won. Sure. You bet.

Frankly, I have had enough of 9-11. Fuck 9-11. I’m not going to watch the shows. I’m not going to any of the memorials. I’m not going to the 9-11 sales at Wal-Mart. I don’t want to hear about 9-11. I for damned sure am not interested in watching politicians of either party try to out 9-11 each other. I’m tired of this national 9-11 PTSD. I did my bit for revenge, I went to war, I’ll remember the dead in my own time in my own way.

I’m not going to shed a damned tear today.

We got our revenge. Many times over, for whatever good it did us.

I’m going to go to a picnic and enjoy my day. Enjoy this victory we’ve won.

I suggest you do the same.

I have always had a problem when 9/11 rolls around because of the fact that we were not in the United States when it happened, so we missed all the media coverage.  You never realize how our emotions are affected by media coverage until the entire country spent several days glued to the television, while you were in another country where the event did not receive all that much coverage.

When we returned home from England, it was to a different country.  The first thing I noticed was flags everywhere.

My grief over the events of 9/11 are real and deep, but can't possibly match those who sat here, day after day, watching video over and over again, hearing the anguish of people searching for relatives and friends, and sharing their tears.

So I think that Jim Wright has a point with his comments about the commemoration of this date.
Mostly, I am angry that Facebook chose to delete his words as inappropriate.


Aren't the brave men and women fighting for this country fighting for such things as the right to speak our mind about things that are important to us?  I can't find anything offensive in his piece. I didn't go enjoy a picnic on 9/11, but I did watch many hours of Star Trek instead of 9/11 memorials.

Never Forget

I don't want to stomp on anybody's grief or anything but somebody just dropped the straw that broke my back. For the past month, the hysteria leading up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has been bothering me. And then on 9/11 we saw endless back to back pieces about the attack and people's grief, and thousands of shots of people running through the streets of New York, in terror. There were news coverages, personal memories, talk shows, and the cable channels which have no live programming were running schlocky movies about personal stories of tragedy and heroism of that day)

(The only "new" story I heard was a 10 minute video narrated by Tom Hanks, which is well worth your watching)

People felt the need to relive it all again and again and again and yeah, OK. If that's what you need to do, fine, but does everybody have to repeat "Never forget" or "We will always remember?"

NEVER FORGET? That's like saying to a family grieving the loss of a child "You'll always remember him." Like we're going to say "Yes, we have three children. I think we used to have more, but I'm not sure."

This was the worst attack on American soil in the history of our country and everybody is acting like if we don't keep playing and replaying the same coverage that we have seen yearly for the past ten years, we might somehow forget about it.

We Americans seem to have the need to wring the most emotion out of every little thing, so when we are hit with an event of such staggering magnitude, everybody goes into overdrive, each network trying to outdo the other one in who can get the most tears, the most horror out of that event.

No, you don't want to let it rest, but sheesh...the only event that I've seen in my life that got more ridiculous coverage was the 3 day non-stop tribute to Tim Russert following his death. I respected Tim Russert, but NBC kept the grief going endlessly. In fact, NBC may have given Russert's death even more coverage than the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I spent 9/11 with a NCIS marathon, after watching the ceremonies at Ground Zero. I didn't need to see the close-ups of survivors hands tracing the names of the loved ones they lost, or get close-ups of eyes welling with tears. I felt I had given the event all the attention it deserved, with the respect that it deserved, but I was not about to sit here and wallow in show after show, interview after interview, family grief after family grief just so I could be sure that I would "never forget."

Somehow I suspect that if I hadn't even turned on the television on 9/11, I might still have remembered the event.

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But in the good news department, we have ordered the new Pergo!!! They are coming out to measure the living room on Thursday and we'll set up an installation date at that time.

"Did You Hear?"

We were in transit and arrived in London on 9/11/01. This is what I wrote the morning of 9/12...

It's a weird feeling being in a foreign country when tragedy strikes at home.
We had a lovely (if bumpy) flight over to Heathrow, arriving at noon, taking the bus in to our hotel. We met the manager of the hotel, who apologized for our bad experiences last time, told us he had left chocolates and a teddy bear for us in our room, gave us his name and told us where we could find him if we had problems. And we just had to wait till the room was ready.

While we were sitting there, some Americans came in and I overheard them saying something about a problem at the World Trade Center. But I wasn't sure what had happened.

When we got to our room, we turned on the TV and began to watch the horror unfolding. It just didn't seem possible. We watched the panic in the streets.

We heard the British news reports, which eventually became local. Tony Blair was coming back from a conference early to meet with his advisors. They had shut down the government buildings.

We needed American news. We found CNN.

Where did Ron work? Didn't remember. Did he work near the World Trade Center?

We watched for 2 hrs until time to meet Ellen and Rob for dinner.

We came downstairs and gave the key to the desk clerk. He smiled. In the background I could hear news reports.

We walked out onto the street, still in a daze. But this was London. People were going on about their business. I remember leaving my office after JFK was shot...the hush in the streets, everyone talking about it. None of that here.

We passed a news stand with two signs, one atop the other. The first said "Hundreds feared dead in NY Terror Attack" and the other said "Thousands feared dead in NY Terror Attack."

It was rush hour and the people passed by without noticing. Blaring headlines are nothing new in this country.

All around us were British accents. I strained desperately for an American. "Did you hear?" I had to ask.

Where were the Americans?

We rode the tube and an announcement came over the loudspeaker "If you are flying to the US or Canada, you must call your airline before you leave."

It was very warm in the tube and I remembered how hot this country keeps its indoors. I remembered the man who talked about helping someone whose skin had been burned off.

Brits carried newspapers, but nobody seemed to be reading them.

Where were the Americans? I needed to ask "Did you hear?"

We walked along the corridors and the heat made it difficult to breathe easily. What was it like to breathe in all that black smoke?

We finally met Ellen and Rob. Rob had a newspaper and we compared notes. They had heard when they were touring the Tower of London. We shared information.

A couple of older British women sat at the table next to us. One opened a paper. "Oh my goodness!" she exclaimed. She heard our accents.

"Did you hear...?" they asked.

We talked about the horror, the tragedy, and our fears. Ellen and Rob reported their problems in the tube because of an "incident" at the Embankment station which closed the tube temporarily.

We left dinner and made our way to a bus stop. By now there were more locals looking at headlines in horror and asking "Did you hear?"

We came to the cybercafe so I could let people know we were OK and so I could find out if Ron was OK (he is). All around me are Americans sending notes home to loved homes. "We're OK--are you?" the messages say.

Suddenly I don't want to be here. I want to be home. But there are no flights going to the US, so we will stay here and look for Americans and ask, "Did you hear...?"

It's a surreal day.