[lit-ideas] Re: race to the bottom
- From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:58:25 -0500
It's odd, isn't it, how 9/11 affected everyone ....
It seems to have moved me to ask questions nobody wants to answer or
even consider.
That said, I'll bite on how 9/11 affected me. I cried for loss of
friends. I cried at the televised self-sacrifice of the firemen. That
night, I had a nightmare about people jumping to their deaths. I gained
and lost 20 pounds over the next year.
Like Julie, I became much more of a news reader after 9/11.
I also saw kneejerk reactions from the poets and writers in my circle --
on 9/12 they understand it all, that it was entirely the US's fault, and
that they must immediately mobilize to protest any military reaction to
9/11. That's when I realized they were assholes or zombies or both, and
that I had been one too.
Now I may have become a different kind of asshole or zombie, but it's
the result of more careful reading and thought. At least I'm my own. And
better still, I've learned how provisional and incomplete opinions are,
and that if you don't constantly re-evaluate and readjust opinions, you
just become someone else's asshole and zombie rather than your own.
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