Most people that know me in every day life would probably be pretty suprised that I tend to refrain from social & political discourse on this blog- I am a person of strongly held opinions. But that's never been the purpose for this site, and I think people expect that they will see knitting content- mostly they do. However, today a friend sent me a link to a website called
We're Not Afraid. It was created in response to the recent bombings in London and I am prtty impressed with the message. You'll see a new button over there, that-a-way --->
I couldn't always post this button. I wasn't as directly influenced by the September 11, 2001 events as some people- I didn't loose anyone personally. But I was more connected than most of the people I was around at the time and it was very isolating for me. I grew up in the shadow of NYC, and could see the skyline from my bedroom window. Like a lot of kids in my hometown, one of my parents worked in Manhattan. My dad, in my case, worked for an insurance company all his life, in midtown. His mother worked there before him. My fifth grade class trip (it was our "graduation" trip- in our town 6th grade is midddle school) was to the top of the WTC towers. My favorite place on the ENTIRE PLANET is the New York Museum of Natural History (yes I am still a science geek :) ) and I spent most of high school sneaking into the city with & without permission for one reason or another. A city the size of New York creates it's own gravity, shared vocabulary ("the city" means Manhattan ONLY), common experiences. It was part of my life, and I grew up with it.
I also grew up suburban middle class and travelled once to Canada. I went to college, a large state university, where I was indoctrinated into the -isms that go along with multiculturalism. It was as natural as breathing to a kid from North Jersey, where you were the minority if you weren't Puerto Rican or Italian. When you grew up 8 blocks from Paterson, a town that still hadn't really recovered from the race riots of the late 60s. My world-view was artifically broadened by my education, but that was unusual for our town & area. People with money owned Plumbing Businesses and lived on the hill. I spoke what halting Spanish I learned in high school, and the Italian I picked up from friends' parents. I was sheltered. I felt safe, I felt carefree, I felt like a citizen of my town, maybe NJ, possibly the US, but certainly not the world.
I got married in July 2001, and moved in late August to San Diego, CA. Then 9/11 happened. As I said before, I was lucky enough not to loose anyone personally, but my hometown & the area I grew up in was in shock. The first edition of my alumni newsletter came with a list of dead. My hometown newspaper, 14 pages for a busy week, mourned the area dead. Parents of aquiantances, people a few years ahead of me in high school I recognized by name only, people my father used to work with that I never met but had heard about for years. A family friend who was a PAPD Officer lost count of funerals he went to. And I was in San Diego. The grad students in the program kept asking me "aren't you glad you are out here?" The idea was ludicrous, I WANTED TO GO HOME. I had fantasies about handing out cups of water at Ground Zero, I carried my best friend from high school's picture with me 24-7 (he's a fire fighter in a town close to the city.) Nothing and no one around me seemed to care, after that morning. Campus never closed for the day.
After a few weeks, mourning over the event seemed to be strictly controlled by the far right, politically. You said "God Bless America," (translated as "Jesus bless the temporary magnet on my SUV") and prayed for the troops. What you were supposed to do as an atheist from Jersey, who knows... What I did was drop off into a depression that was an echo of what happened after my mother died. I couldn't sleep. We lived 3 miles from Miramar and Camp Pendleton, and every flyover (and there were a lot of them) sent me into panic attacks. I quit grad school and eventually got some treatment. I got a job, and found my way back. My poor husband got the worse before the better, but he never wavered. Four years later, we live one town over from where we grew up. The NY skyline still looks funny. But life went on, and I am happy and so is he.
My heart goes out to the people of the UK. So many of them will be influenced by these events and not know what to do. I hope it is easier for them than it was for me. But after all this time, there is one thing I know for sure. I will NOT allow anyone to make me afraid. I will not look differently at the person next to me on the plane. I will not stop living, and laughing and loving. I refuse to give a single second of time for people who think their cause, whatever it may be, is worth killing people over. Life is too short to allow anyone with those methods a platform.
