I feel it belongs to New Yorkers, a few passengers on three planes, and a few at the Pentagon.

But no way will I concede this day to Mr. Bush.

But get some rest, BooMan. Your sensitivity and care for others is your greatest strength. Don't beat yourself up. I'm glad you took the day 'off' to enjoy Football. It IS important to try to participate in life like ordinary citizens now and then. You are an extraordinary individual, as is everyone who posts here, because you care enough to speak out, and to try to make the world a better place.

Hugs tonight. Get some sleep. There'll be time enough to grieve tomorrow.

"If you look for the social economic motive, you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth." - George Seldes

Being 3000 miles away from Ground Zero, my only connection was watching way too much damn TV that day. My spouse's best friend, who occasionally had meetings at the Twin Towers, was nowhere near them that day...in fact, he'd overslept and called his office to say he'd work from his apartment that day. Another friend who worked for PATH fortunately did not work at the WTC offices.

Other than watching Keith Olbermann, I plan to avoid the vast majority of the 9/11 televised crap. I've got three NetFlix discs to watch, a ton of DVDs that I own, some good stuff on the DVR, and if all else fails (or the spouse wants to watch the crap) I'll retreat to the bedroom with my iPod and immerse myself in Beethoven's symphonies or Bach's The Art of Fugue...


-- Walking In Darkness --

I just wrote my reflection (a bit rambling) about the day.

I dont even know if I can adequately (and concisely) express how I feel but I'll try.

When it happened I was angry at the attackers.  Now I'm much angrier at the supposed "defenders".

I guess that's not such an original statement tho is it?

Pax


Night and day you can find me Flogging the Simian

I did a podcast for today.

Remembering 09/11

Doing My Part For The Left,Left Of The Rainbow

Sept 11 did not surprise me. I'd had a sick feeing in my gut from the day Bush was elected, that this country had crossed some line and that nothing good could lie ahead.

The moment that really sent chills racing down my spine was when he  grabbed that bullhorn and spoke. I knew I was seeing madness in action. I knew it deep down that place inside that I trusted fully, after years of working with the mentally ill.

He was in his glory: that moment, for George Bush, was all about HIM. Not about us. Not about those who had died there. It was all about HIM, and his delusions of grandeur. His whole presidency has been about HIM.    

ONward!

This day belongs to me.  It is my day to do with what I wish, because I am very much alive.  Every day is a good day to fight inequity, evil and fearmongering.  Every day is a good day to smell the roses, hear small children playing, and rededicate oneself to all that is good about life and living.

Don't let whichever bastards you believe did it take this day away from you.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. -Margaret Mead

Narrative is a tremendously powerful tool; it is communication at many levels, and that's even more true of visual narrative like a film. A well-crafted story grabs at the heart, the gut, resonates with one's own experiences, inner hopes and fears. But to do so, a story must indeed be crafted. It doesn't just happen; you have to carefully balance the story elements, make the characters both believable and sympathetic, so your audience will identify with them, get that emotional resonance going. You have to balance the pacing, how fast things happen, when characters learn what, how much the audience knows versus how much the character knows. You build tension that way, and suspension of disbelief, and if you get all those elements woven together just right, you have people staying up past midnight to finish your book, or leaving the theater in tears.  

But as compelling as a good story is, the truth is far more powerful. Real people. Real stories. Experiences that aren't carefully crafted, but raw and unedited. The emotional resonance doesn't have to be coaxed and timed just right -- it leaps out and grabs, it pulls you into another person's life, their pain, their joy, their experience, because it's real, and you know it. It's why "reality" shows (the "reality" of which is highly questionable) get the audience they do - because even when staged and edited for entertainment, the stories of real people are still more enthralling than scripted stories about characters played by actors that we know aren't real at all.

There are hundreds of thousands of 9-11 stories, and they're all real. Vibrant. Painful. The people who were there. Those of us who saw it on television, either when it happened, or when it was replayed, over and over and over, in the days that followed. Those of us who knew someone in the Towers, or on the planes, or in the Pentagon, or know someone who knew someone... Those who did the search, rescue and cleanup afterwards. Those stories aren't the whole story -- they're individual stories, intensely personal, and they're all true.

Those stories resonate far more intensely than any dramatization... no dramatization can even come close, all it can manage is a faint echo of the truth. Granted, that shared experience, the memory it is designed to resonate with is very recent and very strong, and so the echo is pretty strong too. But the real thing is still stronger. It unites instead of divides. It uplifts instead of crushing down. It reaches out. It can overcome the fake drama and spin. The stories have to be told, shared, printed, and re-told.

This is really getting a bit rambly... I only meant to give a kind of introduction to something else, a livejournal post that had me in tears earlier... talking about truth versus docu-drama, history and getting it right. Well worth reading, and passing on (I'm putting it in a box so it stands out a bit more from all my ramblng here, since this was really the point.)

I Remember Townsend, by liz_marcs

Keith Olbermann speaks for me.

You left out Cheney's Addington. He's the brain and machine behind Cheney.

Share. Share resources, share delight, share burdens, share the healing. Sharing will bring us back from mass suicide. www.share-international.org

Yep, I feel as you do, BooMan.  I just can't add anything more.

Fear will keep the local systems in line. -Grand Moff Tarkin Survivor Left Blogistan

My tv has sat silent for the most part, except for some video exercise tapes since about 1995.  I have no use for wall to wall commercials.  I have no use for news sandwiched between those noisy walls.  I have no use for sound bite news.  I have no real though about getting cable because I had cable and found that I then had 30 channels of wall to wall commercials.

You all can watch for me, cause I don't think I've missed very much.  Maybe some Bill Moyers stuff.  I quite frankly wish we had a tv store on the web where for some fee a month I could watch what I wanted from tv sans commercials.  It could start out with old reruns of Lucy and Carol Burnett and Ed Sullivan and go on from there.  Some people might like the mockumentaries but I like to know real from fiction.

Grandma Jo

 I know it is 9/11 five years later.  For me it marks 5 years since I was diagnosed with throat cancer from which I survive, still.  I will, of course, forever share the national horror with my own.  I am well, thank you, got my voice back, which meant as much to me as my brain, I suppose.  I would have been, perhaps, less-offensive had my noise- making abiliity failed to return but I doubt it.  
   I am sick today of a different illness;  I am sick of the deliberate choreography of fear and its annual peaking chorus.  The shrill mourning of our collective loss reminds me of the long -lamented commercialization of Christmas.  Will I be forced to lay low and concede the devious fearmongering as I now accept the giving and getting of Christmas?  I will not; but, most Americans apparently will.  
   I cannot separate the legitimate remembering from its corruption-  any more than I will forget that my personal and our collective nightmare share the same day.
  So we remember as Americans by listening to the charlatans of high office take stage with the honest survivors.  I will remember-- but I will not break to hold their dirty hands.


truettspeak

I was on my way to work on the east end of the Island (Long Island) when my wife called my cell, very upset, and said a plane had hit the WTC. I told her it must be an accident. She called again when I got to work to tell me another had hit. That's when I knew. She freaked and wanted the kids out of school, an overreaction, but understandable. I tried to calm her down, with little success, while litening to NPR. Then the Pentagon. Shock and anger began to take hold of me.No matter my politics, I love my country, or at least I did then. I went with the guts I work with to watch the coverage on a big tv in the office and I remember looking at the face of one of the guys, a retired NY cop, and Vietnam Veteran....as the towers fell, with cops and firemen inside, he began to cry. A tough guy through and through...crying. That's when a cried a little too. It was an engulfing sense of outrage, shaking anger. I had the need to be there, or at least be near. Freeport, the south shore town I'm from, is 15-20 miles from Manhattan and you can see the towers from the bay there. I wanted for some reason to be close. I can't say why.

Like most others in NY,NJ, Conn, I know someone who lost someone. But it was something mush larger that was lost that day. My innocence, and much of my ignorance. I don't feel angry anymore. I feel sad. It was a waste. And I do feel that we somehow had it coming, or that something, maybe something less terrible at least, should have been expected. Regardless of whether it was our fault or not. It should have been predicted. I feel now that Bush gained far more from the needless deaths of those people than Bin Laden did. What enrages me now are the continuing deaths around the world as a result of how we've dealt with the attacks. It's complicated for me...still.

"green grass and high tides forever"

i dont think i understand feeling it doesnt belong to you....i still have strong feelings about the whole day and what happened and i dont think about or relate it to whats happeneing today or politics at all...its just its own experience that needs something...understanding maybe...and that makes me need something....comforting mostly.

i was in bed asleep when my daughter called me that moring around 9am and told me to turn on the tv....i turned it on just as the second plane hit...and i was glued to the tv the rest of the day.....back then i owned a nightclub of sorts in philly and i didnt have much to do on a tuesday...i worried about my boyfriend who had flown to north carolina the sunday bbefore on business and was coming home the next day....of course he couldnt fly home and by thurs had rented a car with others and was driving back....on wed i had to make a decision about opening the club for our usual wed night activities....it was a very difficult decision...it felt almost sacriligioous to open and do some partying as usual when all those people had just died....but so many people emailed me to ask me to open so they had a place to go and be with others...people who had no family in the....that i decided to open the doors and let all the members know they could come in and just hang out...i actually ended up staying at the club for 6 days straight, staying open 24 hours a day so people could come in....the staff stayed too and everyone just curled up on sofas overnight....there was virtually no party like atmosphere at all going on....but hundreds of people came and just sat and talked....as it turned out we had one member whose wife wwas killed at the pentagon....but i personally didnt know anyone else actually killed on 9/11.....but does that even matter? i remember looking at photos of people who died trying to see ig i recognized anyone....i remember sister clubs around the country and especially in dc and nyc checking in to say all their members were safe....we collected money for the red cross and we participated in all kinds of fundraisers....i personally became obsessed with video of people jumping out of the buildings....i stil dont understand that but i have thought a lot about it and i think its my way of making the whole experience more bearable somehow....watching and feeling the horror of it....i dont want to forget that...i dont want to be numb to it....ever....i correlate it to the image of a man dying on a cross....why do people need to constantly be reminded of that image?  its a horrible image but i think they want to remind themselves of exactly that....i think religion in general is there to make life bearable for some people and i think they use that image to keep the cycle of horror-sadness-fear-salvation going.

i think the republicans have really tapped into that cycle too...keep those images of 9/11 up front to remind people of the fear and the horror....then remind them that they (the republicans) are the salvation.....yes there is a cost....but in the end they (the fearful people) are saved and life is bearable again.

i cant get the gorillaz song "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head) out of my head.

i think it will work.

Edible panties taste like crap.