confessional
\'Round about four years ago, I came into work and the guy in the next cube over with an odd expression on his face and said \"Did you hear the news?\"
I thought about this for a minute. \"Uh, no.\"
\"An airplane flew into the World Trade Center!\"
I thought about this for a minute too. But really, I only had one reaction to this bit of news.
\"Cool!\"
In retrospect, that reaction may have been a bit regretable. The seriousness of the thing really started to sink in in the hours that followed. But at that moment, it represented change, sweeping and drastic. Far from our mundane, work-a-day existence, we would get to see something happen, and in a big way. And the optimist in me figured that, ultimately, that would be a good thing.
And, I guess, I just like disaster scenarios, entirely divorced from the consequences. Back in highschool, I was reading a (not very good) book in which some terrorists blow up Big Ben. I went up to a friend and went \"Wouldn\'t it be cool if somebody blew up Big Ben?\" and, to his credit I suppose, he stared at me aghast and said \"No!\"
I was vaguely disappointed.
When Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf Coast, then a Category 5 storm, the mayor of New Orleans was suggesting that the storm surge would completely overwhelm the city\'s levee system and swamp the city. An entire city. I didn\'t even realize New Orleans was below sea level. How the heck did they even build a city there? Anyway, at that moment, I thought the idea of that happening would be really cool. And I was kind of disappointed (and, sure, relieved) that it didn\'t.
And then, of course, it did.
I guess I was kind of hoping, back when I was thinking it would be neat, that we\'d get to see people rise to meet the challenge head-on, tremendous feats of human ingenuity and courage. Or something. Not that I\'m saying there isn\'t anything like that, because I\'m sure there is. But it\'s certainly been overshadowed. I don\'t know what I was expecting. It\'s turned out that it\'s all just a big fucking disaster. And it looks like it\'s gonna get worse before it\'ll get better.
I\'m not going to point fingers or jump to conclusions or anything. I\'ll leave that to other bloggers, Fark and the 24-hour news cycle. I only have a very vague idea of what\'s going on anyway. It\'s at times like these when I realize how much I\'ve come to rely on the CBC. TV headline news shows, newspapers, the Internet and so forth only seem to allow you to get a tiny glimpse of what might be going on, usually devoid of any context. It\'s listening to the CBC where I get to hear people actually telling their story, and I feel like I actually might know what\'s really going on.
Right now, I\'m mostly ignoring the news and hoping things generally turn out all right.