Badger Mom

As always, I don't have much to say about today. But I'm sure that my friends will. Especially my annoying local friends who have never been to NYC or DC at all. They'll wax poetic about patriotism and how the day profoundly affected them, and I'll do my best not to puke all over my keyboard. I did some pre-emptive defriending over on FB last night just to avoid the most egregious past offenders.

I'm ever so grateful that the office I was in didn't have a view of the Towers. I consider it a great blessing that I only saw the tragedy unfold through the impersonal filter of television. I could distance myself from it a little bit as a result. But I did have an unobstructed view of the Empire State Building which was only a few short blocks away. We didn't know what was happening, so we all felt fear and a sense of imminent danger. I was desperately emailing and calling everyone I know, checking in with them, making sure they were OK. Some I didn't hear from for hours, and I panicked thinking about my uncle whose jewelry store was only a few blocks from the WTC, my old roommate who had a client in one of the Towers, the students at my old high school whose new location was RIGHT THERE. I'm still amazed that I didn't lose anyone.

Transcript:

I'm sorry. It's necessary to say this and I wanted to separate myself from the others on the air about this. If at this late date any television network had, of its own accord, showed that much videotape, and that much graphic videotape of 9/11, and I speak as somebody who lost a few friends there, it, we would be rightly eviscerated at all quarters, perhaps even by the Republican Party itself, for exploiting the memories of the dead and for perhaps even trying to evoke that pain again. If you reacted to that videotape the way I did, I apologize. It is a subject of great pain for many of us still, and it is probably not appropriate to be shown. We'll continue in a moment.

If you haven't seen the video he's talking about, it's here. I don't want to embed it on my journal, because, frankly, I never want to see it again.

It is necessary for me to say this: Of all the low-down, dirty, fear-mongering, exploitative, rotten, fucked-up, crazy ass things to do, this has to be the capper. What little respect I had left for the current RNC has completely evaporated.

I was there.

I don't mean I was sitting several hundred miles away, watching from the safety of my living room, vaguely concerned about New York. I mean I was on East 53rd Street and Third Avenue, about four and a half miles from the WTC, looking out my office window at the Empire State Building, just a few blocks away, wondering if that was next.

I wondered if I'd make it home. My aunt and uncle own a jewelry store just a few blocks from the WTC. Where were they, and in what condition? What about my old roommate, who had a customer at the WTC? Was he at their site that morning?

The man I was dating was a police officer. Where was he? Where were my other friends who were policemen, firefighters, paramedics?

I remember that day. I didn't need to see it again. I never want to see it again.

What kind of people are McCain and Palin and the other bigwigs over at the RNC to allow this? Picking at a scab only makes the wound last longer. My mother taught me that at age six. It's still true. Allowing a wound to heal doesn't mean forgetting that it ever happened, nor does it mean forgetting the lesson you learned when you received the wound. I only had to burn my hand on the stove once to learn not to touch the cooking pot. My mother didn't feel the need to make me touch it again. Well, the RNC just made everyone watching touch that hot pot again. It was bad enough for me. Imagine how it felt for the relatives of the 2,974 people who died that day.

I feel like puking up my lunch just thinking about it.

I'm posting this on several forums. I know there are some of you who disagree with me and are itching to prove me wrong, to change my mind. Do me a favor and answer a few questions first:

Were you were one of the thousands who watched the city go up in flames with your own eyes? Did you lose someone in the Towers, the Pentagon, or that lonely field in Pennsylvania? Were you one of the hundreds who took that lonely walk home over the 59th Street Bridge with me, wondering if your friend or relative was dead or alive? Did you spend hours on the phone, waiting for an open line so you could let people know that you weren't dead? If not, I really don't want to hear you argue with me about this one.