I stopped watching TV a long time ago. We don’t have cable, so all I’ve been able to see in the past 24 hours has been network news. Even the WB–virtual home for America’s detached, unflinching, jaded teens–bumped their regular programming in favor of ABC’s coverage of the events. Flipping through the channels, it’s the same broadcast again and again, with slightly different hairstyles: Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings repeating and repeating and repeating and the news is always the same. Or it gets worse. I can’t listen for a little while.
I’ve tried to console Jonno, but it’s hard, since I’m not exactly sure what I’m consoling him about. (I must be shaken, too, if I’m ending sentences in prepositions.) So far as we can tell, all his friends and family are okay–some were physically and emotionally closer to yesterday’s events than others, some were pretty distraught, but technically, they’re all okay. His apartment, his neighborhood, it’s all still there, too.
Ultimately, the pain he feels–and that many of us feel–is as nebulous as the as-yet-unnamed perpetrator of the attacks. It doesn’t exactly stem from an “Attack on America” (despite what the media would like us to think); I mean, if the Superdome had been attacked, or even a major airport, it probably wouldn’t have mattered nearly as much. In the same way, the pain doesn’t precisely stem from an attack on Jonno’s hometown, either. What is it, then?
Personally, I think it’s two things. First and foremost, it’s the massive loss of human life, civilian, lives, bystanders, played out on the internet, the radio, and of course, national television. No matter how heartless or disaffected or distant or world-weary people pretend to be, it is impossible to watch that footage of a passenger plane slamming over and over and over into the side of a densely populated office building over and over and over and see people clinging to the sides of the building and falling off the building and trying in vain to jump 100 stories to safety and both buildings collapsing and knowing that hundreds of resue workers doing their job were crushed alongside the very people they’d come in to help…there’s no way of seeing that and not identifying with those faceless people, those dots falling through the sky, the implied dots looking unbelievingly from the windows of their airplane moments before impact, the intensity of fear that must have struck each and every one of them. There is no way to watch that and not have a physical, visceral reaction. The news media know this, know that the trick to telling any story–news feature, commerical, or feature film–is to make the audience identify with your characters; if you can do that, they’ll watch indefinitely. Ergo, there’s a reason they only flashed occasionally to the Pentagon, where hundreds of people likely died, but none of them on camera. We identify with Hamlet, we watch ’till the story’s played out. Same principle here.
I also think Jonno’s particular grief–and mine, in a way, and that of our friends in the city–stems from the sheer suddenness and magnitude of change. The city’s environment has changed forever, both physically and symbolically. Those compass points marking the southernmost limit of the shining borough of Manhattan–of invaluable importance to me and everyone else who’s ever been to New York and stepped out onto the street from an unfamiliar subway stop and said, “Oh, well that’s south, home is this way.”–they’re gone. The center of the Western world is unmarked.
Or is it? I’m guessing that that great void, that yawning nothingness, that stretch of gradually-clearing sky once eclipsed by two world-famous landmarks, will still function as a guide. Like the city’s own phantom limb, we will be able to look to the horizon for some time to come and know that that’s south, because that’s where the World Trade Center once stood.
On a more practical note, all of you wanting to give blood, skip it for now; apparently, there’s more than enough to go around. Give funds instead.
And for all of you non-webloggers in NYC who haven’t emailed me yet, do so now, dammit. I think you’re all okay, but confirm it.
sturtle [dot] com 