I had a long, hard think about what to write. I even thought today that I should avoid any happy, sarcastic postings. I think I am lacking words (and anyway, so many others have used those words more efficaciously than I) to describe just how atrocious the event was. How it changed the scope of the world and altered many lives forever. How, from that day on, so many of us were marked permanently as we lost our innocence, or feelings of safety, and our knowledge that no matter what, the U.S. mainland was always a pillar of strength and security. We were the ones who came to the aid of others in their time of need. Nobody could touch us in our borders.
Until they did.
And I wasn't inside the borders of safety when it happened. I was outside, looking in. I was a member of the troops that had been seperated from the unit in the worst battle yet.
I had a meeting at 3:00 pm, or 9:00 Eastern time. Just after, my phone started going nuts. I ignored it. I hate taking telephone calls (ironic that I work in telecom, eh?) We tried to dial in a few people for the meeting, who were in the U.S. at that time. The circuits were constantly busy. We figured there was just a network problem and gave up. The meeting continued for a while, then a bit later we had a coffee break, where I ran into my manager.
"Something is going on in your country." he said.
"What?" I asked, bored, preparing myself. People liked having a go at my country.
"I don't know. Something about New York and planes crashing."
"What?" I asked. This was strange. What was he talking about?
My phone rang then. It was my Mom, and she was crying. She told me that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. Another hit the Pentagon. Still another was suspected to be heading towards the White House. Then she had to go.
I was in shock. This had to be a joke, the worst media hoax in the history of bad media hoaxes. This just didn't happen. Not even Hollywood could be that fucked up to make this up.
But I had to go back to my meeting and keep going. I felt dizzy and sick, but my day had to go on. My manager was there, his manager was there, and his manager was there. I had to pull it together.
When I was done, I raced home and watched the news all evening. I cried a lot. I didn't understand it all. I went to the U.S: Embassy and found that hundreds of Swedes had, too. And they had left a wonderful and supportive testimony of how shocked and outraged they were, too.
And through it all, we mourned. But unlike the U.S., we couldn't grieve as long or as deeply. We had to pick up and keep going, move faster. We were a part of it, but weirdly not a part of it. The anniversary is quietly noted here. It is in the news, but not the leading story (and certainly not today, when Sweden is suffering its own horror). I found this a bit odd.
I talked to an English colleague yesterday, who put things into perspective for me: "You have to understand, H. What happened it above and beyond all levels of horrible. But in Europe most of us have been facing homeland terrorism for a long time. I don't know how many thousands have died in horrible ways from IRA bombs loaded with nails, bombs that killed scores of women and children. We don't mark each of those days, we only try to keep going."
And the bombings in Spain. Greece. There was a bombing in a shopping mall in Finland last year that didn't even make the U.S. news pages. Although what happened in the U.S. was the worst of all ghastly bombings in the history or terrorism, the people here are more battle weary. They mourned just as deeply as we did, but they have already been toughened to the staggering nightmare of home terrorism.
I will never, ever forget what happened. And I will never, ever forget the anniversary. But to me, here in Europe, we have to keep going. This does not mean move on and forget. It means that we have to feel sad and mark the day in our hearts, but not let the grief and the memory shut us down.
I am brought back to one fact: on the day it happened, I had to keep going. I had meetings, issues, things to do. I still do. But that doesn't mean I will ever "get over it". I just get to go on, like the rest of the EU.
Wonder if I will get a blitzing for this post...
-H.
Posted by Everydaystranger at September 11, 2003 09:42 AM | TrackBack