Since it is now de rigueur to begin every blog post with a long and desperate explanation of the unforgivable amount of time since I (or Clayton) last wrote, allow me to fulfill this stereotype. I like writing, I really do. I used to love it, but writing and I decided we were moving a bit too fast and decided to cool the jets for a little while, date other people, and see where we stand. There are times when I feel, "the inspiration" and I feel like a water pipe full of pressure, just needing the right shower head with which to blast forth. Other times I feel the pressure, but that the shower head is in desperate need of a good cleaning in order to stop blocking what I'm trying to get out. There are other times still, when I feel no inspiration. When I sit down to write and can't even think of a subject, much less a clever sentence. I feel almost an anti-inspiration - as if thoughts and ideas are being sucked from my brain before they can even formulate. I don't want to write anything, not even a grocery list.
I suppose that writing, like love, is part inspiration and part commitment. I suppose. The other side of the argument is that I don't have to write. Why should I? Why force myself to do something that has no perceptible benefit to myself if I don't feel like doing it? This seems like a pretty winning argument, but it never is quite enough for me so I can only presume there is some sort of germ deep down inside of me that feels the need to express itself in front of other people. I actually have four different blogs bouncing around in my (otherwise empty) head right now, but none are grabbing a hold of me and pulling me by the arm to the keyboard. So...picking at random, here we go.
9/11. Obviously the 10 year anniversary was this past Sunday. The only reason the 10 year anniversary is a bigger deal than the 11 year anniversary, or the 9 year anniversary, is because human beings are (customarily) born with ten fingers. However, it's good to use the occasion to step back and take stock of where we are. Mag and I did the usual, "Where were you on 9/11?" story telling thing to one another. Our stories are practically exactly the same. She came into her living room and found her dad watching one of the towers burning. I came into my living room and found my mom watching one of the towers burning. She thought it was a movie or something. I thought it was a freak plane crash. I'm sure that I had heard the word, "terrorism" before 9/11, but I don't remember it. Everyone likes to say, "The world changed overnight!" and in a way I suppose it did, but not really. Perspective changed - the way we saw things changed, but really my every day life hasn't been affected in almost any way.
There's a weird one-upsmanship when it comes to tragedy. If you sit down with a group of six people and ask, "Where were you on 9/11?" people seem to fall into some sort of competition for the title of, "Most Affected by the Event." If they were planning on flying that next week, you'll hear about it. If one of their cousins lived an hour outside of New York, you'll hear about it. If they had thought about going on vacation to NYC the year before but went to Disney World instead, you'll hear about it. I don't know why we're like this. I think that perhaps it is due to the fact that our emotions feel strongest to us, of course. I feel my sadness more strongly than I feel your own. Your story of the morning of 9/11, told with just mere facts, doesn't nearly do justice to the emotions you felt that day. You need to add some sort of detail to highlight the truth that you really felt something, and it was different than what those around you felt.
I do the same thing. The story of my morning of 9/11 is super boring. I saw it, was confused and scared, and watched the whole thing on TV all day. It was a weird, shocking, and numbing feeling. I never felt in fear for my actual life, as I didn't live in any place a terrorist would ever attack (the religious intolerance and technological backwardsness would probably just make him feel at home. Except the fact that we like girls in short shorts). Still, I feel the need to let you know that I once stood in the World Trade Center on December 30th (or 31st) of 1996. That doesn't make me any closer to the tragedy, but it is weird to know I stood in a place that would later be destroyed by a foreign attack. I feel the need to tell the story about how in November of 2001 my sister and I flew to Mexico on American Airlines. American Airlines, of course, was one of the airlines famously used in the September 11th attacks. While we were there American Airlines Flight 587 (AKA, the plane wreck no one remembers) crashed into Queens, New York City, killing 265 people. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility and for a second or two everyone thought it was a terrorist attack. I was out of the country by myself at age 17, flying American Airlines (I wasn't literally by myself, but it wasn't a situation where I could run to my parents and ask what to do. I felt responsible for myself and my sister). Alone in my hotel room, I really freaked out. My passport, ID, and all my money got locked into a safe that no one could remember the combination to, and my mind went into full on problem-solving panic mode. I actually got tools, took the safe out of the wall, broke open the back, and started trying to chip away at the cement that is evidently inside of safes. Knowing that the passcode was 4 numbers long, I calculated there were only a possible 10,000 combinations. I came up with a plan that involved stealing a master key off of the maid's cart, throwing the safe off the roof of the hotel, and all sorts of other wild and panic stricken ideas. I had two roommates and so I had us work in shifts - one started with the code 0001 and worked his way up, and the other started with 9999 and worked his way down. I started in the middle. I decided that if we didn't get the safe open by morning then I was putting my plan into effect, and then getting out of the country as soon as possible. I lay in the bathtub that night (fully dressed, with a blanket and pillow. It was my bed that evening) praying as I'd never prayed before, telling God, "If you get me back to America I will kiss the ground and I promise to never leave that country again." The safe opened sometime during the night, to combination 9871 (I still remember, ten years later). I got my stuff, and stayed in Mexico another 6 days. I've been back twice since.
What does this story have to do with anything? Not much, to be honest. I just like telling stories. Truthfully, however, I'm a very calm, rational human being. Don't mistake that for the inability to feel emotion, for I am full of passion and joy and excitement and stupidity - I just have a pretty good reign on anger and panic and fear and depression and those sorts of things. The above scenario of mind numbing panic I don't think would have ever happened without 9/11. If I was in a different country and a plane wrecked I'd feel pretty glum, but not that it had any sort of effect on me. That was just the fear and strangeness I felt about the terrorist attacks manifesting itself. 9/11 didn't affect me more than it affected anyone else, but it felt so real to me that I need to heighten the stakes to communicate that. Also, I'm very clever and use a discussion on how people feel the need to give all the details of their own not-terribly-interesting stories to give you all the details of my not-terribly-interesting stories.
I'm not terribly good at (nor terribly concerned with) stringing disparate thoughts together into a cohesive whole so allow me to jump to a related, but entirely different, subject: Conspiracy Theories. There have been a few articles that have come out around this 9/11 anniversary that discuss all the insane theories that sprung up after the twin towers were destroyed. As I may have mentioned in the past (paragraph), I am a rational and calm human being. I don't really believe in any conspiracy theories. I think Timothy McVeigh was behind the Oklahoma City Bombing, that man has walked on the moon, that Elvis is dead, Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK, that old guy killed MLK, and that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK (this is the hardest one to believe, but I think that's only because we were taught the theory conspiracies along with the facts). I also believe that we know the full story (or like 99% of the full story) about the WTC attacks. Al-Qaeda flew planes into the buildings and then they collapsed, killing thousands of people.
Conspiracy theories are so dumb. I think they're fun, in the, "let's be teenagers and smoke weed and sit around and talk about if aliens really built the Great Pyramid" type way, but they're super immature and they really piss me off. I get irrationally angry over conspiracy theories. Here's what I think - we don't want to believe that one man can change the course of the nation by shooting the President as he drives down the street. We don't want to think that two iconic skyscrapers can be brought down with little effort. These facts force us to realize that we live in a fragile world - that we live in a place where the only thing keeping someone from walking into IHOP and killing us over our pancakes is that we've all sort of agreed not to do such things. Our minds construct elaborate theories to convince ourselves that there has to be something greater pulling the strings - the faceless government actually killed all of these people to destroy some files they were trying to hide, it wasn't just a crazy man. A faceless god sent a hurricane to kill these sinners - it wasn't just a strong weather pattern that could kill any of us given the wrong circumstances.
A conspiracy theory, at the risk of sounding elitist, is the product of a weak mind. We've all known the guy or girl who, despite overwhelming evidence, refuses to believe that their significant other is cheating on them. It's obvious to everyone else - there's a reason that he isn't returning your calls during this certain time, or suddenly acting differently, or seems to be hanging out with a new girl but is, "only friends." Your mind doesn't want to believe it, so you construct a false reality, or believe his weak excuses, and then later after the relationship is over say, "How did I ever fall for that?" This is a small scale conspiracy theory. The problem with conspiracy theories is that the theory never comes near to matching up with the facts. You have to want to believe in the theory in order to believe in it. In the case of the Twin Towers, there are, let's say, five things that make one think perhaps there was something more going on. Why did WTC7 burn down? How did the building collapse? Was it a plane or a missile that hit the Pentagon? Blah blah blah. However, with any of the theories, there are a thousand unanswered questions that the theorist conveniently overlooks. That's called confirmation bias. You take the things that back up what you've already decided happened, and you ignore the rest.
Most conspiracies seem to revolve around the case that our own government brought down the towers as an excuse to go to war, or to destroy something inside of them. They did this by conveniently hiding a thousand small explosives in the buildings' structures and then detonating them once they had a million news cameras recording everything (to make sure the conspiracy theorists would have some good footage to derive their theories from). Not only do the motivations not make any sense, but none of the facts line up. Theorists say things like, "There's no way a jet could bring down a sky scraper!" Really? Because every other time a jet has hit a skyscraper the buildings don't fall down? My favorite is the argument that a plane didn't hit the Pentagon, but that the government just said one did and really shot it with a missile. WHAT? So where is the missing plane? Why would the government even do that? They're obviously willing to kill thousands of Americans on a whim, but they couldn't afford one more plane to wreck into the Pentagon? They just had the genius idea, "Hey! Let's fire a missile at the building but tell everyone it was a plane and hope no one was looking!" Somehow our government is smart enough to pull off these giant conspiracies, but dumb enough that all the crackpot theorists can instantly figure them out.
I really want to sit down face to face with one of these conspiracy theorists and debate them but they make me so angry it would just almost instantly devolve into me calling them names. They would say, "Jet fuel only burns at x degrees Fahrenheit and it takes y degrees Fahrenheit to melt steel - explain THAT to me." I would say, "SHUT! UP! I can't believe you are an adult who is allowed to drive a car and hold a job and raise children! Are you INSANE? Take a step back and look at how completely crazy you are!" Then I'd probably fly a plane into them. No, I can't explain how every single detail happened on 9/11 (though I can explain the temperature of steel thing) but I don't have to. I'm not the one coming up with insane theories that make no logical sense as a way to keep myself from believing that some poor guys from the Middle East could mount such an effective attack on our civilian population. The burden of proof is on you.
Take a deep breath, Andrew. Now, the sensitive reaction to 9/11. Most right-wing people find me unforgivably liberal. Most left-wing people find me unforgivably conservative. I approach things issue by issue and try to use common sense and empathy in forming my opinions. I would like to make one thing explicitly clear though - I love this country. I think we've done plenty of things wrong, and I think our militaristic reaction to 9/11 has been characterized by misstep after misstep and has played right into Osama bin Laden's hands (except the shooting him in the face part...or did we???), but that doesn't change the way I feel about this country as a whole. I feel about this country the way I feel about my family - they are genuinely good people who want to make the world a better place. They screw up, they do things wrong, they are at times angry or mean or dumb or self-centered (except for me of course, I'm known as, "The O'Dell Family Angel") but I love each and every one of them with a burning unquenchable love, and I would die for any of them in a second. I'm a mean old man, but I honestly get teary eyed almost every time I hear the national anthem. When man (and by man, I mean white man) discovered a new pristine world during the Age of Enlightenment (and named it America) they were given a chance that we'll probably never have again - a chance to start a new government and a new society and apply all the principles we learned through the trial and error of the past thousands of years while leaving behind all the baggage and tradition that we could. No one knew if this would work. It was a big risk, and a lot of people with a lot to lose put everything on the line. Our national anthem is a plea - tell me, is this experiment surviving? Is this new chance we've been given being wasted? Has it been destroyed? We will meet with adversity, we will face trial, we will have to deal with enemies - both the enemies without and the enemies of our own nature, but when the sun rises on the next day will the flag still be standing?
There is a ton to hate about America, and I dedicate a good deal of time to making fun of this country. I don't say, "This is the best nation in the world!" and I don't own a single American flag, and I don't take pride in how little I know about other countries or how little I identify with other nationalities. The fact remains, however, that I love my country. It's a marvelous place, for all it's inconsistencies and I am privileged to live in it and hope to, as my mother always taught me, to leave it in better condition than how I found it. I genuinely hope we're past the time when national man made tragedies such as 9/11 happen. I wish for a world where everyone progresses to 2011 and we don't have these weird first world versus third world conflicts. How has 9/11 changed me? It hasn't. I'm still alive. I'm still happy. I'm still foolish. I'm still free. I'm still irreverent. I'm still prone to bad judgment. I still laugh loudly. I still love. I still cry. I still work. I still want to make this world a better place. I still complain. I still make jokes in bad taste. I still offend. I still believe.
I'm still America.
