2001-10-22 - 3:11 p.m.

(more of the same)

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Before airplanes crashed into buildings, it was all so theoretical.

We could look up from our back porches at the sky and imagine, what if that airplane crashed into that building? And we�d say sure, that could happen. And what if I jumped over this railing, or swerved into oncoming traffic? What if an earthquake struck, or a tornado lifted our apartment from the ground and deposited it seven miles away?

Could happen. Would never happen, though. This is real life, not theoretical life, and what could happen doesn�t happen.

So much was theoretical. All our books read and knowledge accumulated, all our discussions and debates, our plays on words and our arguments for argument�s sake. We looked down at the world from our comfortable place on top. We could imagine a million parallel universes � where airplanes crash into buildings, or a meteor hits the Earth, or everybody decides to spontaneously be nice to each other � and the real world would go on, same as always.

Then airplanes crashed into buildings, and suddenly anything really could happen. One of those things that could happen once in a million lifetimes happened, and the world was knocked out of joint. It was as if somebody said, imagine a world where one day, airplanes can crash into buildings; what would happen? Only that universe, rather than the normal universe, was the one that played out. We set off into a parallel universe with this one singular day that changed everything, certain that the real universe, the normal universe where airplanes don�t crash into buildings, is still going on out there somewhere, with people still thinking their banal thoughts and taking their lives for granted.

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But has it really changed? Has the frailty of existence suddenly been made so clear? Or is this Earth-shattering event just another sensational story, to keep me preoccupied and paralyzed, like the 2000 election or the impeachment saga?

It�s just an image, an idea, a story, something to talk about. It isn�t reality. It isn�t my life. The news captures me like it captures everyone else � I find myself wandering the streets, out to the water, all the while listening to the news on my headphones. It occurs to me when I wake up each morning. But it feels more like a huge distraction that won�t go away, another pebble in the brain, than an event in my life.

I tell myself, this is important. This is the defining point of my generation. And I wonder what it could mean to me.

The hypotheticals, it turns out, haven�t become any more real. Images on the TV screen aren�t real, no matter how surreal the images, no matter how much the people on TV tell you they�re real.

The voices on the radio keep telling me everything�s changed, it�s a whole new world. Having been told that, I feel a responsibility to act, to do something. All along I have been looking for a cause, for a reason to snap out of my doldrums and finally push for the improvement of the world, to be a force of good. Now the radio and television is yelling at me, the world is in trouble, World War Three is upon us, the time for inaction is over.

I start to believe it. I tell myself that I must contribute in some way, that if I am for this war than I must be a part of it and if I am against it then I must be against it. And I actually convince myself, for hours at a time, that I will sign up for the war, that I will insinuate myself into some less-dangerous faction of the army, become an ambulance driver like Ernest Hemingway or something. I start resigning myself, saying, okay, well, I guess there�s no turning back now. I�m destined to become a soldier.

That�s when I realize what a fool I am. I�m not going to war. I can�t commit to myself, to a job, to a cause for more than I few months. I�d run screaming from the idea the moment I seriously considered it. But, in all the hoopla, I have allowed myself to daydream about what I could become, and I have allowed even this world crisis to become one more hypothetical to be pondered over, all from the comfort of my warm apartment with my books and my slippers and my blankets, nothing to remind me that real is real, pain is pain, and you wouldn�t want it if it came, so don�t even daydream about it.

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Maybe we�d all slipped into this hypothetical daydream for a while. Maybe that�s what the American Dream is all about. If America is about a dream, then it�s not about reality, it�s about invisible markers and unreachable ideas, it�s about a world completely divorced from reality, from the pain and suffering and the sense of mortality that brings people together. We�ve been trying to pretend that suffering doesn�t exist, that if we ignore death for long enough it will go away.

Our world has been complicit, turning the sufferings of the world into a series of stories, telling us of the idea of ethnic cleansing or suicide bombings without forcing us to witness its bloody realities. We have allowed our system to isolate us in a glitzy American dreamworld, where images of supermodels and scrolling stock prices take us further and further from the concerns of a world that we are influencing in a million little ways that we don�t understand.

The response to that September morning says less about the new world, and more about the world that came before it, when the world was in pain and we pretended not to notice. I hear stories of people across the country crying for the victims, and I think not, how compassionate we are, but rather, how cold we must have become! How callous, to not blink an eye at the thousands who toil hopelessly to make our clothes, to turn a blind eye at the inversion of our nation�s principles when it suited our national interest. How hollow, to hear of the slaughters of Rwanda, Somalia or Yugoslavia and nod, yes, I think I did hear something about that, as we go on with our flippant lives. Only now, when it lands in our faces, do we finally comprehend that yes, life is fleeting, and all the consumption in the world won�t cure you of that. Yes, suffering is real, whether off in some unknown kingdom in Africa or right here in our precious homeland.

Is this what is required for us all to understand suffering, for us to finally understand that we are one, that we can never conquer our own spirits until we stop trying to conquer one another, capitalize on one another? Must we each suffer individually before we can understand the suffering of another? Can we never take action without being pushed into it? Can we never try to save the world until it becomes clear our own lives are threatened until we do? Can I never wake up and understand suffering until I suffer myself? If that is the case, then bring on the suffering, but be gentle, let us learn our lessons ourselves for once and not wait to be burned, let us suffer just enough to love but not so much that we hate. Suffer us into maturity.

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