When I woke up last Tuesday morning, I looked over at my clock because I felt too rested to have arisen at a decent hour of the morning. Oddly enough, it was 10:20. Not too shabby, but then a pang of panic hit me as I realized that my mother was supposed to call me at 9:30 to wake me up. We were going to go get her new car at the Honda dealership. So I grabbed my cellular phone, which I'd left on overnight so my mother could call and wake me up. There wasn't a call from her. I was confused, so I gave her place of business a call. I asked her why she hadn't called me. She proceeded to tell me that I didn't have school and that we weren't going to get the car that day because they were bombing the United States. Awake, but still not oriented, I only asked who it was that was bombing the United States. That's when she said I should go turn on the news.
Still completely unfazed, as though I were dreaming, I sauntered upstairs to my living room, where my kitty was sleeping in the window. I turned on the TV and switched to CNN, where I promptly heard a reporter go, "Oh my God," and watched as one of the Twin Towers toppled to the ground before my eyes. My brain, at the time, just wasn't processing the information, so I sat there and watched for a while, waiting for some sort of footage as to what happened. Sure enough, it came. Bam, instant replay of a plane crashing into the tower. That was when I fully woke up and began to comprehend what was happening.
I'm not a good person.
My first thought was, "Son of a bitch, we're at war?!? I don't want to die!" So I called my mom back and asked what the hell was going on. In the background of our conversation, I could hear death totals being estimated. People were guessing as to how many people could have been in the building at the time of day this happened. When I hung up with my mom, I watched the news some more, petting my cat and saying to her, "I'm scared too, hon. I don't want to die." At some point later, the second tower dropped.
Why wasn't I thinking about the people who might be dead? Why wasn't that affecting me? Around noon, I decided to give Caniprokis a call to see if he knew what was going on. He was genuinely in shock, genuinely worried. I called my boss to see what he was doing and he was also genuinely worried. I even called my previous boss to see how he was. Then I went online to talk to some people. Stone, of course, was calm, but still worried. J was the same way. Nobody else was available online. I then sat down and watched the news for a while, until nothing new was happening. After that, I went about my daily routine: showered, shaved, got dressed, fed the cat, etc. My day was per usual aside from my mother being upset and my Dad talking about how we're going to get into another stupid war. My Dad was in Vietnam, but he knew he was there for a bullshit reason; so he was really shaken and said that if there was a draft that my mother and him wanted me to go to Canada. I can only remember thinking, "Whatever."
Why wasn't I upset? Why was this not bothering me at all? At the time, I wasn't worried about my lack of response, but now it bothers me. I was watching the Mets game the other night and the announcers were saying that it's a good thing baseball is on because it gives people time to get the past week's tragedy off their minds. You know what I was thinking the night of the attack? "Damn it, they canceled the Mets game!"
Pretty much everyone else is pretty emotional about this. All kinds of prayer services have been held. The only thing I can think to myself about that is, "Religion caused this!" I see people waving the American flag around, displaying their patriotism. And how do I feel about that? "Look at these prejudiced assholes. All this popular patriotism amounts to is an anti-Arab sentiment. It took an attack on America to get people to treat each other nice and actually appreciate their country. How pathetic." And I can list several other examples of my feelings on this matter, but the most important one is that you can say so many thousands of Americans died and I'm not affected, but then you can say we need to bomb the crap out of some Arab country and I start thinking about the innocent people over there.
Why don't I care? Why am I not angry that someone had the gall to attack my country? Why aren't I upset by the loss of innocent American lives? Why do I feel the need to try and get people to think that we shouldn't go to war when even Stone and Peps feel we should indiscriminantly bomb the shit out of Afghanistan? What's wrong with me? A day after the attack, I didn't even want to hear about it anymore.
Why am I such a terrible person? I claim all this concern for human life, yet the loss of all the humans in the WTC attack doesn't even faze me. It's as though I don't believe it happened, like I'm not even serious enough to grasp it as a reality. But I know it happened. The same thing happened last October when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed. Everyone got all upset and I didn't even care. "Whatever," I said.
What makes a person so cold and indifferent to the lives of his fellow countrymen? Am I really a traitor? After trying to be so patriotic in spite of a President I didn't vote for was elected, why do I feel the need to take up the cause of the people who probably attacked us? WHY?!? I don't even know the words to "God Bless America". Not that I'd want to sing it, but what American doesn't know that?
And I was feeling so good last night. =(