UBL is Dead

Copyright © 2011 Ernest Bloom.

That son of a bitch.

Once in fifty years, in a hundred years, a shock
jolts the system, and nothing's
ever the same again. I know you don't

see it that way. It's not because
you're young now; it's because you were
too young then, no more than a child who could not
guess what the Pentagon was, or find Pennsylvania
on a map, or even New York, much less Afghanistan.
I know because, remembering when I was your age,
I would have thought, I'm certain, not so very differently
than you. So I won't talk down to you, or preach, or assume
a paternalistic pose. I don't judge you. I don't even disagree.
How could I? But will you do the same for me?

After that
TERRIBLE DAY
this

natural-born liberal could not
hear the Star Spangled Banner for years without
choking up (I, who had never been a patriot any more
than you feel yourself to be a patriot; I, who was
equally suspicious as you are suspicious of patriots who blindly
follow the flag into national destruction); could not
sleep without the radio on and tuned to NPR,
jazz through the night, just in case another
catastrophe should be announced. Listening
to music became not disrespectful but trite, and for
six years music was blotted from my world.
Some of us who were not ten years old were changed
in ways you never saw and haven't understood,
because you couldn't. The parents
you know now are not the people they were on
September 10th. We all became
different people that day, not better people,
our lifelong sang-froid crippled in moments,
never to rise again. We can only

operate within the moment; our emotions
are geared to the now. But nor time nor life
are thus comprised, and human memories
degrade with predictable rapidity, here today,
gone within a week. Time is not this little bubble
around ourselves and our acquaintances; time
is a mighty river in flood, pushing us forward like chips
bobbing helplessly along, and I hope someday
you'll see that on one bright sunny morning that river
was shunted violently aside to find strange new banks
and waterways for which none of us had planned,
and whatever life you would have known, should have known,
was brutally stolen from you by an evil man. That was the childhood
you were supposed to have had; those were the parents
you were supposed to have known: gone. That world,
five decades in the making, collapsed. Fallen into gray ash,
beyond all recovery in those horrifying moments
when the towers fell.

Something was cut out of my soul that
only now do I believe may come back again; the same
something that was removed from your soul, and you don't
even know it yet, because you never
learned how to miss it.

And I hope you're never
transformed into a patriot this way.

Now that son of a bitch is dead. And I
believe in God, and I consider myself a Christian, and I
celebrate and respect thinking and devout
Buddhists and Muslims and Arabs and Jews, and I
respect agnostics and atheists too.
And I believe in freedom and democracy,
And I believe in Truth.
God bless America.
God bless this whole world.




click the article title above, and then click:

Tweet