In A New York Minute….everything changed

I haven’t really acknowledged this day in a very long time. I’ve always tried to let go of grief instead of wallow in it. Especially when I don’t feel entitled to it. I’ve, like so many other people who weren’t related to any of those who were lost, tried to pick up the pieces of the world I knew and move on. Tragedies happen, and the events of ten years ago were tragic on an epic scale.

But that’s the thing. It was ten years ago, and on the decade anniversy of one of the most frightening days of so many people.  I feel like I need to say something…

 If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life…

They say you’ll never forget where you were. It’s true. You don’t. Or at least I don’t. And maybe you’re not supposed to.

I was asleep. It was a normal university morning. I woke up to the reports on the radio, and I honestly thought it was a radio drama, or a dream. It didn’t sink in. It wasn’t until I came downstairs and saw my mother sitting staring at the computer screen that I started to realize that something really was going on. She turned around to me with this look of terror in her eyes and I found myself sitting down very heavily.

 Yeah…it’s true. It’s really happening

The bottom seemed to fall out of my world. I remember being so angry, because so many people had fought and died already so that “my” generation and those after us didn’t ever have to live through something like this. I remember thinking that we were going to war, that I was going to have to live through a war, just like my grandparents, and their parents. I remember wishing my grandmother was alive.

I sobbed all the way to class – yes, they made us go. The world went on. University did not officially shut down, but they didn’t expect us to show up. The image that will always stay with me is walking into the theatre building  which was normally a humming chaos of people running lines and practicing music and building sets, to find it dead silent. The few students that were there were clustered around the janitor’s battery powered radio – tense, and silent. Like something out of a wartime movie.

I’m sorry I’m late …I have relatives in New York

One girl said on the way into acting class.

My theatre history prof walked in to the amphitheatre, took one look at the crowd and said

Given the events of this morning I think it only fitting that we’re discussing tragedy today…

And my art history prof, is the one I remember the most of all

Does anyone know what the hell is going on, and more importantly – does anyone want to …no, does anyone need to talk about it

That’s where I was. Like so many others, that day I was an American, despite being the proudest Canadian of them all, that day I was an American. Out of the ashes of that day, there were moments of beauty in the panic, moments of light flashing through the darkness. It’s those moments we should remember just as much as the pain. Focusing only on the pain means that they have won  – not the terrorists – but terror itself.

In today’s world of security searches and constant monitoring, I have to wonder if we’ve lost sight of the lessons that day taught us. We have let the events of one tragedy pull us into a world of fear and paranoia, we have let it turn us against each other when it should have united us as human beings.

So yes, remember where you were. Honor what happened, honor those who didn’t make it out…

But ten years have passed…we must turn our eyes away from the past and towards the future. Take the message that we can all be united, that differences do not need to result in tragedy or war or pain, let that be the message you take forward into your lives, let that be what you pass on to your children.

Every week in the Farewell show onboard, we stand on stage and we preach that message. We tell our passengers that if they can do it here, in this little petri dish of an environment, surely we can do it in the rest of the world.

Somehow just now…it doesn’t seem like a corny message after all.

Brightest of Blessings
God bless
Goddess Bless
Namaste
And all the rest

Shaughnessy