My Mind

Posted March 25th, 2003 by Sean Williams

Carolina On My Mind came on this morning at the gym. I don’t know why they sometimes play easy listening at a meathead factory, but they do, and this morning at some point James Taylor came on. I almost couldn’t breathe.

Of course I was on a treadmill, so not breathing was sort of par for the course.

It seems ridiculous. North Carolina isn’t “Carolina”. It isn’t the place of safety and strength and expression that is has come to mean to me. There are racists and idiots running the state. If anything, New York is closer to “Carolina” for me, this is the place where I have the most options, this is the place where I can look at people and we all remember the Towers falling, we all remember the 14th street Salvation Army, we all remember desperately reading and writing emails to our families…

But the war weighs heavy on everyone, me included I guess. I feel alone in my concerns about it. Why did people think it would be going faster? We’ve been at war for about five days, and the stock market is reeling from the perceived problems we are having. I feel like the people who wanted this war thought we would be liberating Iraq, and the people who didn’t want this war want to stop it right now.

I feel like we could have waited, but not forever. So, what do I know? I can’t listen to my friends mock the peace protesters, and I can’t listen to my friends insist that Bush is a monkey, or Hitler, or whatever. I can’t even pay attention. You must forgive me if I’m up and gone to Carolina in my mind.