Dancing with the young Americans
It has been twenty years since 9/11. I was—for just another month—nineteen then. More than half my life has been lived in the shadow, not of that grief, but of the war that battened on it, and I cannot see a way out from under it even now. The war can vote now. Could last year. The dead cast shorter shadows than the myth they were made to feed. And so like everything else in this country, they haunt us and it is not my place to mourn them, except that as part of the community of a nation I should have been asked to, and what I was asked was to wave the flag for a nationalistic fantasy instead. I lost no one to the towers, but I am losing someone to the war, and I do not want to see what happens when it is my family's candles against the next war's photo op.
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*hugs* The loss is never, not to quote CCR at a time like this, the senator's son. It's the kid down the block. It sucks, it fucking sucks and I am sorry.
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I know it didn't start with W, but he has still never held the weight of his share, and he never will, and it should have buried all of them.
The loss is never, not to quote CCR at a time like this, the senator's son. It's the kid down the block. It sucks, it fucking sucks and I am sorry.
*hugs*
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Thank you for linking it. It's eerie to read now, and yet I remember being 19 and feeling exactly the same way, looking at the oncoming tidal wave of war and Homeland Security and jingoism -- except that I had a younger perspective on it. I remember feeling this awful churning mixture of hope (surely we'll course correct? surely people can't actually follow through on doing this, surely someone somewhere will stop this? we're doing protests, we're doing vigils, we're calling our representatives, surely this will end up too unpopular to follow through with?) and cynicism (Bush doesn't care, Cheney doesn't care, they're going to send us to war against Afghanistan who had nothing to do with this, we've bombed so many people and as soon as it comes home to roost people are lashing out, greed and cruelty are driving the bus). I really, really wanted my hope to be the one that was correct, though.
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I remember hoping, too. The first election I could vote in was 2000. And W wanted his war. It was a great introduction to being young and changing the world.
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Cassandra is not a consolation prize.
*hugs*
(I thought of Nightwatch, too.)
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*hugs*
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Thank you.
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Beautifully said. Yeah. Yeah.
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*hugs*
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*hugs*
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hugs you a lot back
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And it was not inevitable. History is not an impersonal force like gravity or oxidation; people make it happen. So many things since then did not have to happen.
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*hugs*
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Also, hugs.
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*hugs*
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Wes. Who isn't dumb at all, but he is a kid, and he should be in our family for decades, and short of the miracles none of us believe in, he won't be.
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