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for whom the bell tolls / time marches on
Sep. 15th, 2001 02:00 amLast night was the first night you had to go to all-news stations to get the, well, news from the East. Tonight I turned on the tele when I got home from my show (it's morbidly routine now to not go more than 3 hours w/o catching up somehow) and I found, much to my surprise, the standard late night wasteland except for NBC which was re-airing the memorial service from the National Cathedral this morning. Apparantly there's nothing at all new to report and the networks are sick of repeating themselves. That's fine, I suppose.
But because the networks have let their weary newsanchors go home and their programming has moved on, somehow I feel like I should have by now as well. Too bad I haven't. I wish I could talk to someone who was my age during the Pearl Harbor attack. Makes me wonder how they dealt. How long it took them to truly move forward and not ask themselves every few hours how the boys on Oahu were doing. I suspect it wasn't until the end of the war, if ever.
Which is somewhat unsettling because we're not entering a war that has a clear beginning or clear victory conditions and so we feel we have no one to fight and conquer, only an act, a way of thinking, a war founded not on ideas but on wiping out the hatred of other people's ideas. Your ideas are fine, we say, we let you have them and don't bother you. Why must you kill us for ours? You have taught us nothing but bitterness. And then we get out the Sharpened Stick, wave it around and hope the right person shows up on the Sharpened End.
Not that I'm criticising our government or any person, but I myself feel like a turtle caught shell-down, waving its stumpy legs in the air while green-tinted turtle tears run into its hair. And nobody seems to know how to right us.
But because the networks have let their weary newsanchors go home and their programming has moved on, somehow I feel like I should have by now as well. Too bad I haven't. I wish I could talk to someone who was my age during the Pearl Harbor attack. Makes me wonder how they dealt. How long it took them to truly move forward and not ask themselves every few hours how the boys on Oahu were doing. I suspect it wasn't until the end of the war, if ever.
Which is somewhat unsettling because we're not entering a war that has a clear beginning or clear victory conditions and so we feel we have no one to fight and conquer, only an act, a way of thinking, a war founded not on ideas but on wiping out the hatred of other people's ideas. Your ideas are fine, we say, we let you have them and don't bother you. Why must you kill us for ours? You have taught us nothing but bitterness. And then we get out the Sharpened Stick, wave it around and hope the right person shows up on the Sharpened End.
Not that I'm criticising our government or any person, but I myself feel like a turtle caught shell-down, waving its stumpy legs in the air while green-tinted turtle tears run into its hair. And nobody seems to know how to right us.
