Monday, September 14, 2009

9-11

I had just moved to Boston a week before 9/11. My sister-in-law called me and I turned on the news. It was gut-wrenching. Really surreal. Like I was watching some cheaply shot movie. I was alone with Dalton. He was six months old. Gavin was doing training for work in Texas. I put the baby in the stroller and walked around town. Our neighborhood was heavily populated with Jews. And when I say "Jews", I mean Israeli Jews. I walked in to a Jewish deli, and ordered a bagel or something. The news was streaming behind the young man at the counter. He gave me whatever I'd paid for and turned back to the TV. A fellow Israeli was watching with him. He turned to his friend and said, "Well, maybe now America will know what we feel every day."
I was shocked.
But for someone who was from an area where there were daily "terrorist attacks"- not on the scale of 9/11-but every day, it seemed like he was saying "Welcome to the club." For him, in his homeland, there was no safe place. No bus, no market, no synagogue, no school that was off limits. And so he was jaded, and bitter. And he thought, "It's about time you people get it."

The interesting thing is that a Palestinian could have made the same observation about the rockets being launched over their homes every day. Indians could have said it about Pakistanis and vice versa. There are many people who face violence and fear every day. It's just that we were so comfortable...and felt so undeserving of it all. As if all of those other people in the world deserve the violence they are enduring.

And while I mourned along with the rest of the nation...and the rest of the world. It was interesting to think about fear, and terror for all the others in the rest of the world.

1 comment:

karen said...

I still tear up when I watch clips from that day.

on a less deep tangent--I love your new sidebar photo. (it's new, right?)