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Apr. 19th, 2013 07:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeNo, Irish just isn't happening this morning.
Apparently shit went down last night while I was asleep.
Also, it's April 19.
I have a vague memory of watching the news on TV at home that day, I'm not sure why. Possibly it was spring break. Because it was on a Wednesday, although it was early enough in the morning that maybe I caught it on the news before I went to school? I don't remember. I could also be conflating it with when someone shot up the Capitol. What I do remember, clearly, is hearing the words "Federal Building" and thinking, oh shit. What if it's a national thing? What about Mom? Mom works at a Federal building, is she okay? The news was much, much slower then, and instead of working in the city proper she worked in the suburbs, at a different location, she'd moved out there a few years earlier, so it was a while before I learned it was just the one incident, and she came home safe.
When I was a child growing up as I did, where and when I did, within an advanced-educated and politically active family and just hitting the end of the Cold War in Washington DC, I was aware in the back of my mind that if someone decided to end it all, they'd probably start with us. We didn't have duck and cover drills at school or anything, I think they did their est to keep that kind of politics out, and as a bilingual school which did have at least one ambassadorial child (from Japan, I don't think her parents were actual ambassadors but they were connected to the embassy) with us, not to mention being taught by Peace Corps veterans, we had other politics we were thinking of. I must have learned about it at home, although I don't remember ever learning about the nukes and the Cold War. It was just one of those parts of childhood, like riding horses or eating with chopsticks. The possibility that some day someone would drop a nuke on my town and we would all be over before you could say "oh, holy shit, that's a..."
April 19 was when I learned that it wasn't the only horrible thing that could happen. Instead of nukes falling on DC, now I had another nightmare of the faces of buildings being blown off, people like my parents who were in early in the morning doing their jobs, killed because someone who had never met them and didn't care to know their names hated that great and nebulous, lumbering thing called the government that they worked for, like someone stabbing a person, if those thousands of individual cells they destroyed had families. Someone could kill my Mom, my Grandfather, my Uncles because they didn't like the organization or the building in which they worked. In some countries this is called "Tuesday" but for me it was a new thing. Being pancaked under concrete. Being trapped, worse, and not knowing whether they would reach you in time.
I do remember where I was on Sept 11, 2001. I was actually asleep in bed, I didn't have a morning class that morning and I was in college and I didn't want to get up, and my boyfriend at the time called me to tell me someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. Again, growing up in DC, this meant something very different, but in this case it meant me having visions of a couple floors of the WTC caved in, with the back end of a Cessna sticking out of them. Someone had, years earlier, attempted to fly a Cessna into the White House. It was a crazyass thing to do, but it wasn't horrible. Then he told me one tower was gone. Just, gone. Then I was awake.
We were all congregated in the lounge. I don't remember much of that day. I do remember one bitch of a teacher docking us points for either showing up late to class or not showing up at all, but everyone else was glued to their television screens. I found out that someone had flown another plane into the Pentagon and spent a few agonized minutes making sure none of my Uncles who worked for or with the DoD had been there (as it turned out that was one of the lowest casualty sites, but we didn't know it then), that my Grandfather hadn't been there because he often shopped at the Costco right by the Pentagon and I had no idea how big the radius of destruction would be. Across the hall from me, one of my friends (we were all in a shared interest dorm, the SciFi/Fantasy dorm) from NYC was on the phone three times as long as I was making sure all his friends were safe. Then I spent the next several hours on the internet collating information from sources and vomiting it up onto a website for people to look at. I remember keeping things in a separate notepad document until they had appeared on enough websites to be verified, because as far as I knew they hadn't all started cribbing from each other yet, and it was a quick and dirty way to avoid posting rumors. I don't remember much of the next few days, I think we were all dazed, and it wasn't so etched in my thoughts. But that morning I remember clearly. I also remember thinking back to April 19, thinking, 'not again. God, not again.'
Now this. When the Boston Marathon news hit I was wrapping things up at work, we didn't have much incoming or outgoing, I think I was finishing mail or something, and then suddenly my Twitter feed was covered in Boston Marathon explosion news. There was footage of the blast. I clung to the idea that it wasn't that bad for a bit, it looked like it was pretty well contained in buildings, and anyone who'd been in there might be dead but it didn't look like it had hurt that many people. And then the news trickled in, full of confusion at first. From an anthropological perspective I'm sure it'll be fascinating later. Twitter changes so much, spreading news, information, misinformation is as easy as typing a sentence and hitting 'send.' And a lot of people aren't careful, so there's a lot of waiting and watching as the dust settles to see the shape of what happened. But the good thing is that checking in with your loved ones can be as easy as typing a sentence and the wait to hear is shorter, at least. If you weren't watching your phone you might be surprised by a text message saying "I'm okay, don't worry" before you know there's something to be worried about. I don't know how I feel about this.
And then I went to sleep last night just as the news about a shooting on MIT campus broke, and my response was fuck this week I'm going to bed. And I wake up and it's played out on Twitter, that this was the Boston Marathon suspects, they killed one cop, one of them is dead, another officer is in the hospital and the suspect is fled. And I'm tired. Wake me when it's over. I didn't want this to turn into "April" just as late January/early February has become the time of "Oh god what space disaster is going to happen now" (the Challenger and the Columbia both blew up within the same one-week period, years apart). Honestly if I had the energy to expand that I would say that this should not be "Tuesday" or "April" for everyone, another April, another bombing that kills or injures a few hundred people. Another Tuesday, another shelling. This is not a thing that should be, for anyone, in any country. It shouldn't happen. But I'm exhausted. I'm tired, and I'm sad, and I can't feel much of anything right now, and I miss the person I was before April 19, 1995, when I was a kid, before this all became the really real world.
Apparently shit went down last night while I was asleep.
Also, it's April 19.
I have a vague memory of watching the news on TV at home that day, I'm not sure why. Possibly it was spring break. Because it was on a Wednesday, although it was early enough in the morning that maybe I caught it on the news before I went to school? I don't remember. I could also be conflating it with when someone shot up the Capitol. What I do remember, clearly, is hearing the words "Federal Building" and thinking, oh shit. What if it's a national thing? What about Mom? Mom works at a Federal building, is she okay? The news was much, much slower then, and instead of working in the city proper she worked in the suburbs, at a different location, she'd moved out there a few years earlier, so it was a while before I learned it was just the one incident, and she came home safe.
When I was a child growing up as I did, where and when I did, within an advanced-educated and politically active family and just hitting the end of the Cold War in Washington DC, I was aware in the back of my mind that if someone decided to end it all, they'd probably start with us. We didn't have duck and cover drills at school or anything, I think they did their est to keep that kind of politics out, and as a bilingual school which did have at least one ambassadorial child (from Japan, I don't think her parents were actual ambassadors but they were connected to the embassy) with us, not to mention being taught by Peace Corps veterans, we had other politics we were thinking of. I must have learned about it at home, although I don't remember ever learning about the nukes and the Cold War. It was just one of those parts of childhood, like riding horses or eating with chopsticks. The possibility that some day someone would drop a nuke on my town and we would all be over before you could say "oh, holy shit, that's a..."
April 19 was when I learned that it wasn't the only horrible thing that could happen. Instead of nukes falling on DC, now I had another nightmare of the faces of buildings being blown off, people like my parents who were in early in the morning doing their jobs, killed because someone who had never met them and didn't care to know their names hated that great and nebulous, lumbering thing called the government that they worked for, like someone stabbing a person, if those thousands of individual cells they destroyed had families. Someone could kill my Mom, my Grandfather, my Uncles because they didn't like the organization or the building in which they worked. In some countries this is called "Tuesday" but for me it was a new thing. Being pancaked under concrete. Being trapped, worse, and not knowing whether they would reach you in time.
I do remember where I was on Sept 11, 2001. I was actually asleep in bed, I didn't have a morning class that morning and I was in college and I didn't want to get up, and my boyfriend at the time called me to tell me someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. Again, growing up in DC, this meant something very different, but in this case it meant me having visions of a couple floors of the WTC caved in, with the back end of a Cessna sticking out of them. Someone had, years earlier, attempted to fly a Cessna into the White House. It was a crazyass thing to do, but it wasn't horrible. Then he told me one tower was gone. Just, gone. Then I was awake.
We were all congregated in the lounge. I don't remember much of that day. I do remember one bitch of a teacher docking us points for either showing up late to class or not showing up at all, but everyone else was glued to their television screens. I found out that someone had flown another plane into the Pentagon and spent a few agonized minutes making sure none of my Uncles who worked for or with the DoD had been there (as it turned out that was one of the lowest casualty sites, but we didn't know it then), that my Grandfather hadn't been there because he often shopped at the Costco right by the Pentagon and I had no idea how big the radius of destruction would be. Across the hall from me, one of my friends (we were all in a shared interest dorm, the SciFi/Fantasy dorm) from NYC was on the phone three times as long as I was making sure all his friends were safe. Then I spent the next several hours on the internet collating information from sources and vomiting it up onto a website for people to look at. I remember keeping things in a separate notepad document until they had appeared on enough websites to be verified, because as far as I knew they hadn't all started cribbing from each other yet, and it was a quick and dirty way to avoid posting rumors. I don't remember much of the next few days, I think we were all dazed, and it wasn't so etched in my thoughts. But that morning I remember clearly. I also remember thinking back to April 19, thinking, 'not again. God, not again.'
Now this. When the Boston Marathon news hit I was wrapping things up at work, we didn't have much incoming or outgoing, I think I was finishing mail or something, and then suddenly my Twitter feed was covered in Boston Marathon explosion news. There was footage of the blast. I clung to the idea that it wasn't that bad for a bit, it looked like it was pretty well contained in buildings, and anyone who'd been in there might be dead but it didn't look like it had hurt that many people. And then the news trickled in, full of confusion at first. From an anthropological perspective I'm sure it'll be fascinating later. Twitter changes so much, spreading news, information, misinformation is as easy as typing a sentence and hitting 'send.' And a lot of people aren't careful, so there's a lot of waiting and watching as the dust settles to see the shape of what happened. But the good thing is that checking in with your loved ones can be as easy as typing a sentence and the wait to hear is shorter, at least. If you weren't watching your phone you might be surprised by a text message saying "I'm okay, don't worry" before you know there's something to be worried about. I don't know how I feel about this.
And then I went to sleep last night just as the news about a shooting on MIT campus broke, and my response was fuck this week I'm going to bed. And I wake up and it's played out on Twitter, that this was the Boston Marathon suspects, they killed one cop, one of them is dead, another officer is in the hospital and the suspect is fled. And I'm tired. Wake me when it's over. I didn't want this to turn into "April" just as late January/early February has become the time of "Oh god what space disaster is going to happen now" (the Challenger and the Columbia both blew up within the same one-week period, years apart). Honestly if I had the energy to expand that I would say that this should not be "Tuesday" or "April" for everyone, another April, another bombing that kills or injures a few hundred people. Another Tuesday, another shelling. This is not a thing that should be, for anyone, in any country. It shouldn't happen. But I'm exhausted. I'm tired, and I'm sad, and I can't feel much of anything right now, and I miss the person I was before April 19, 1995, when I was a kid, before this all became the really real world.