The War

Posted September 11th, 2003 by Sean Williams

I have only a minute or two. Last night was excrutiating, today’s hangover from the piercing migraine I had feels almost worse, but you can’t let a day like today pass without comment.

For some reason, the only thing I feel about today is shame. There is something amusing about figuratively standing up and shooting out your shame instead of just feeling it privately, but sometimes this blog is just me standing in judgement over just me.

I felt ashamed of the people who attacked us, other people who are exactly like me, and, after about six weeks, I felt mounting shame for our President’s reaction to the whole ordeal. For those six weeks, New York came together under our Mayor and seemed to stand together, united in an effort to heal each other and to help each other. The fact that it didn’t last and didn’t work at all makes me feel ashamed as well.

My brother Kent has our emails from that time posted elsewhere on the web, and I honestly can’t read them. My emails just seem like self congratulatory lies. I did do all the stuff I wrote about, but I did them half so I could write something cool and half because everyone else was doing it, which sums up my life basically. I always have one eye on the audience and one eye on the other actors, judging myself as comparison and by applause, not by action.

It is a sad time for me right now. Realizing I could easily leave my theoretical dreams behind to pursue a life on more solid economic footing, realizing that many of my friendships are with people I don’t have any admiration for, just a shared history, realizing that having ideas is about 2% of getting those ideas implemented. It’s a sad time, sad changes are happening to me.

But on a national scale, I am humiliated that the victims can sue the city, I’m dismayed that a once united western consciousness was essentially disregarded by our president, and I am appalled that many of the firemen who were lucky enough to survive the WTC attacks are now losing their jobs to the new economy.

Even more so, I’m ashamed that I didn’t change for the better, that we didn’t learn, and that we couldn’t make anything good come from this.