Posted by finelinebob on September 16, 2006, at 22:22:29
In reply to Re: facing the Beast....Noa/FLB, posted by Shar on September 16, 2006, at 17:19:27
> Man, Noa is good, ain't she? Whoa--wish I was that good!! I could almost imagine myself not suicidal!
>
> SharYeah, she is ALL that.
New York is all over the place. There are those most personally affected because of the loss of a loved one -- who know where they are? The ritual reading of names may help them, but it almost paralyzed me when I heard it Monday morning. Good thing I had the sense to leave my apartment (and my radio) behind.
Those responsible for "healing" that physical, geographic/civic wound? Too busy pointing fingers at each other. And the wound they are responsible for healing festers instead.
Seems there are people here who can't give their pain the respect it deserves. They saw it on TV or listened to it with colleagues at work, 50 blocks away or more ... why should they feel anything about it? They can't respect that the heart of the city they called home had just been cut out, and they can't respect that they all had to live through the aftermath -- posters of the missing/dead on streetsigns and lampposts everywhere in the city, memorials at every fire station and police station, the smell of the fires that burned on for several months dragged through the subway system by trains passing nearby.
"... you've got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it ..."
That song sorta jumped into my head the last day or so. As much as I hate "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" sorts of comments, that song line points to two different things: (1) getting stuck in a moment, and (2) getting out of it. There are still a lot of people who are stuck in that moment, and many either DO not or WILL not accept that they are. Even then, accepting that you ARE stuck in that moment is only the first step in getting out of it. But it's a big one.
Underneath everything was a sense of sorrow, a sense of anger (directed in several different directions, foreign and more often domestic) ... but it was still underneath. At the end of the day, the thing that struck me the most was that the city as a whole was getting on with its life. And starting to do so quite well.
I realized as well that very little of that day upset me. The ritual name reading started dragging me down, but I walked away from that. The conspiracy theorists and all their propaganda -- and I'm using that "conspiracy theorists" label loosely and broadly, right and left -- I just walked away from. And at the end of the day, I had to wonder if it wasn't time for me to start getting on with the rest of my life. Time to get out of the moment I was stuck in. The pit I thought I was in? It's gone. And I get the feeling I can walk away from it and leave it behind.
... the problem now (isn't there always one?) -- which direction to walk?
flb
poster:finelinebob
thread:677313
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/2000/20050828/msgs/686683.html