9/11

September 11, 2009.

Eight years ago today, our world changed forever. We all changed forever as well, perhaps each one of us differently, but we changed. For me, despair quietly walked in and sat down next to horror and disbelief. Fear lurked continually in the background, but I was somewhat successful at keeping fear at bay. The following year, a friend and I drove over to the coast and sat on the Bean Hollow rock headland and watched waterworks pretending to be fireworks, one exuberant burst-splash after another in military precision along the rocks. We believed.

I can't watch the endless showings of the planes into the towers. It becomes another movie, something almost unreal. It can't happen here.

We are now into a new administration, one that won on hope and change. One that I championed and voted for. And just 9 months into that administration, I am once again watching despair creep into my sanctuary. No, not because of our president, not because of the economy, nor the wars in Afghanistan. I am a patient person. OK, sometimes I'm not a patient person, but for these big things I am. These problems didn't happen all at once, and that won't be solved all at once. I'm amazed to hear people say the recession is over!

My despair is at the extremes that have so polarized our nation in the years since 9/11/2001. That didn't happen overnight either. I stood with my two grown sons in Buffalo, N.Y. watching the first bombs dropping on Afghanistan--we had all come together to share our national tragedy--and we all were sad and devastated, but we believed it was the right thing to do. Find that bastard bin Laden and make him dead! We believed.

It was over the next 7 years that the polarization started to grow and fester. And I neither need to nor want to cite chapter and verse. Suffice it to say that the divide between Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats became deeper and wider, and in our confused grief, we began to vilify those on the other side of what became the Great Divide.

I believe that the "normal" divide became the Great Divide due, to a large extent, to the rise of Conservative Talk Radio--the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannitys, the Bill O'Rileys--who are masters of manipulation and deceit. They prey upon those who do not tend to read newspapers, listen to NPR, communicate with their Congressional representatives, or use the Internet to check something on Snopes or FactCheck. These are not bad people, and they are not necessarily religious fundamentalists. They are people who go to work, kiss their children, vote, maybe go to church, and share BBQs with friends and neighbors. But they tend to let others do the thinking for them, and when it's said loud enough and often enough they begin to believe it.

Remember Sarah Palin saying that Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists."? Well, as my mother once told me--once something is said, you can't unsay it. There's a lot of that going around--the saying of things that can't be unsaid, and the purveyors of that misinformation know exactly what they're doing. Exactly. What. They're. Doing.

So--last week, hearing and reading the unbelievable protests against Obama speaking truth to power (our next generation of adults), I mentioned in a Facebook posting that I'm feeling despair again. How silly of me to believe that a new president, whose ideals I embrace, in whom I had (have, dammit!!) such great hopes, could escape verbal evisceration by such small-minded people.

I went to the freezer half an hour ago to empty the ice cubes into the ice container and saw this on my refrigerator:

The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry

Today is September 11th. It's my boss John Fleischer's birthday. And I am going to find some wild things to be among today. I'll pack up my despair, stow it way deep in the closet, and feel free, along with wood drake.