Bookworm

Blog Your Heart | A Melancholy Week

Everyone is keeping it real this week. Stephanie has invited us all to blog our hearts and post the link in her comments to this post, so here goes:

My heart is heavy this week.  The tenth anniversary of 9/11 hit me harder than I expected it to do and I was caught in a web of sadness and remembrance all day Sunday.  I don't think it was unhealthy to remember and allow myself to feel what I was feeling, but it kind of cast a pall over the beginning of the week.  Last night we received word that my husband's aunt has cancer which has spread and this morning learned that this means she doesn't have long to live -- perhaps three months.  She is 62.  We lost our brother-in-law earlier this year at the age of 59.  

I feel selfish because all of these things make me think of my own mortality and that of others close to me.  How much I want to live to be around for my beautiful daughter for a really long time.  How I can't imagine a world without my Mom or Dad or husband or sisters in it.  How I fear illness and disability and death.  How I dread those things happening to my loved ones.  How hard it is to cling to the promise of Heaven, to have faith in things not seen.  

[My main blog -- updated more regularly than this one -- is here.]

 

Ten Years Ago Today. . .

Ten years ago today our innocence was lost.  While I won't deign to speak for others, I believe that for my generation (Gen-X), the events of September 11, 2001 were the biggest and most shocking of our lifetimes. We'd mourned when the space shuttle Challenger and her crew was lost fifteen years earlier, but the events of 9/11 brought an entirely different level of pain.

There were times during that awful day when I honestly wondered if the world was coming to an end. I half-seriously told my friend in NJ that maybe today was the day we'd meet on the other side of the Pearly Gates.  That seems dramatic in hindsight, but that day, with multiple planes hitting multiple major targets, almost anything seemed possible. There were times when I wondered how many planes there would be or whether nuclear weapons would be deployed.  There was an agonizing period of time when my sister's husband was known to be on a plane, flying into Washington DC, and we didn't know if he was safe.  (Thank the Lord, he was.)  

Written in 2002, when my memory was a bit fresher as to specific details:

"I was driving to work when the regional news commentators on the radio interrupted their planned show to tell us that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.  My first thought, like so many others, was that it was a small engine plane.  That idea was shattered 17 minutes later when the news came that another plane had struck the other tower.  I was in shock and disbelief as the radio coverage went to the BBC and then NPR and the reporters tried to find out more information.  Shortly after I got to my desk, the Pentagon was struck.  There was a voice mail message from my mother asking me if I knew my brother-in-law's itinerary and that was when I remembered that he was flying that day, from California to Washington D.C.  I think that was the first time I cried -- when I thought of my sister, expecting their first child, waiting alone to hear from her husband.  Praise God he was all right; he couldn't get through on the phone, so emailed her instead.  He was on the ground at Dulles when the plane struck the Pentagon.  None of the news sites on the Internet were accessible, so I instant-messaged with my friend in New Jersey off and on.  She is the one who told me that first the south tower, then the north tower collapsed to the ground.  It was unfathomable that these two immense structures could be gone.  That all the people in the planes and in the buildings were gone.  There was hope of at least some survivors, but the initial estimates of those killed was very, very high.  Praise God that so many were able to get out.  And may the victims killed that day rest in peace."

This is a picture of me writing postcards while on the Observation Desk of 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) in 1986.  My ticket from that day opens this post.

Remembering. . .

My posts from 2006 #1 and #2. I wasn't on TypePad in 2001 (it didn't exist yet).

President Bush regrets his legacy as man who wanted war - Times Online

"President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran. In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.” Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. [Times Online (UK)]

Avert your eyes, the President is attempting to shape his legacy. 

Too Little, Too Late

Why I Believe Bush Must Go
in The Washington Post 'Outlook' by George McGovern, 6 January 2008

In this scathing and lengthy editorial, former senator George McGovern calls on Congress to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney, believing that the case against them is stronger than that against President Nixon and Vice President Agnew. He excoriates the administration for waging a "murderous, illegal, nonsensical war" in Iraq and egregiously mishandling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. McGovern admits that his call for impeachment is made belatedly and has little chance of being acted upon. This begs the question of whether party politics and his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for President partially motivated him to write this piece.

Are We the Thought Police?

In this Salon piece we, the American people, are under indictment for self-censoring what we know about the Iraq war. Although the Bush administration and the press don't always make it easy for us to be informed, Michael Massing asserts that we don't need their interventions to keep us from the full truth. We simply choose not to read the military blogs and books, among other sources, that detail some of the more horrific aspects of this war: the number of civilian deaths, the proliferation of pornography, and drug use by the troops, among others.

A Death in the Family: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Link: A Death in the Family: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com.

was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed "Seen This?" The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

"Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … "

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.? Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his poem "Man and the Echo":

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? …
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?

Abruptly dismissing any comparison between myself and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, I feverishly clicked on all the links from the article and found myself on Lieutenant Daily's MySpace site, where his statement "Why I Joined" was posted. The site also immediately kicked into a skirling noise of Irish revolutionary pugnacity: a song from the Dropkick Murphys album Warrior's Code. And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those who were neutral about the battle for Iraq … I don't remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.

Good grief, CNN, who makes these decisions?

I received three Breaking News emails from CNN today.  Two of the three I would consider to be important news and one I would not.  Can you identify the "Gee, I could've waited 'til later for this one" story?

• Three major earthquakes strike Peru -- a magnitude 7.7 and two magnitude 7.5, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. There is no word on casualties but Reuters reports buildings shaking in the capital, Lima.
• President Bush's daughter, Jenna, is engaged to be married, the White House says.
• Jose Padilla is found guilty on charges he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism.
  

Study of Iraq War and Terror Stirs Strong Political Response

"The intelligence estimate, an assessment by America’s 16 intelligence agencies, found that the war in Iraq, rather than stemming the growth of terrorism, had helped fuel its spread across the globe. The estimate was completed in April, and is the first formal review of global terrorism by the United States since the Iraq war began. . . In public comments on Sunday, Republican Congressional leaders did not dispute the accuracy of the reports about the intelligence estimate, although they continued to defend the American presence in Iraq. ”I think it’s obvious that the difficulties we’ve experienced in Iraq have certainly emboldened” terrorist groups, Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”  “But I would also argue that these people didn’t need any motivation to attack us on Sept. 11,” he said." [NY Times; emphasis mine]

President Bush’s Reality

"Mr. Bush. . . described a world where Iraq is a young but hopeful democracy with a “unity government” that represents its diverse population. Al Qaeda-trained terrorists who are terrified by “the sight of an old man pulling the election lever” are trying to stop the march of progress. The United States and its friends are holding firm in a battle that will decide whether freedom or terror will rule the 21st century.  If that were actual reality, the president’s call to “put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us” would be inspiring, instead of frustrating and depressing. Iraq had nothing to do with the war on terror until the Bush administration decided to invade it. . . Where Mr. Bush sees an infant secular Iraqi government, most of the world sees a collection of ethnic and religious factional leaders, armed with private militias, presiding over growing strife between Shiites and Sunnis. . . .Fending off the chaos that would almost certainly come with civil war would be a reason to stay the course, although it does not inspire the full-throated rhetoric about freedom that Mr. Bush offered last night. But the nation needs to hear a workable plan to stabilize a fractured, disintegrating country and end the violence. . . It’s hard to figure out how to build consensus when the men in charge embrace a series of myths. Vice President Dick Cheney suggested last weekend that the White House is even more delusional than Mr. Bush’s rhetoric suggests. The vice president volunteered to NBC’s Tim Russert that not only was the Iraq invasion the right thing to do, “if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.” It is a breathtaking thought. If we could return to Sept. 12, 2001, knowing all we have seen since, Mr. Cheney and the president would march right out and “do exactly the same thing” all over again. It will be hard to hear the phrase “lessons of Sept. 11” again without contemplating that statement." [NY Times; emphasis mine]