sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2021-09-11 11:35 pm

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.
selkie: (Default)

[personal profile] selkie 2021-09-12 04:48 am (UTC)(link)
To have been only twenty, and watch everything that was stripped away for no reason, and now to be forty, having watched what the jingoism and fear-mongering has twisted into down the years -- it does get grim trying to count the cost. I talked to a Marine in Kabul who hadn't been born yet when all this started. A Marine who could be our kid. She seemed not to have any illusions about patriotism, not that I heard in her voice. "So you work for, like, a church? ...Do you pray?"

*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.
heron61: (Default)

[personal profile] heron61 2021-09-12 05:41 am (UTC)(link)
Blessings to you and yours - it's scary what our nation has become. Here's my 2nd ever lj post that I made 2 weeks after 9/11, I sincerely wish I'd been wrong. Amidst all the other sadness about what the US has become, I'm especially sad about the people 15+ years younger than you who have no memories of what the US was like before it became the land of xenophobia and endless war.
troisoiseaux: (Default)

[personal profile] troisoiseaux 2021-09-12 12:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Wow. This post is extremely striking to read twenty years and oh god so many Unprecedented Times later. One thing that really sticks out to me is the line about how we'll soon have an "Office of Homeland Security"— as one of the 15+ years younger, I was in college before I discovered that DHS was a recent invention.
genarti: Knees-down view of woman on tiptoe next to bookshelves (Default)

[personal profile] genarti 2021-09-12 02:50 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh man, that post.

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.
minoanmiss: Pink Minoan lily from a fresco (Minoan Lily)

[personal profile] minoanmiss 2021-09-12 04:21 pm (UTC)(link)
That's some prophetic wisdom there.
troisoiseaux: (Default)

[personal profile] troisoiseaux 2021-09-12 12:32 pm (UTC)(link)
*hugs*
isis: (reflecting sky)

[personal profile] isis 2021-09-12 12:46 pm (UTC)(link)
This is beautiful and reflects my own thoughts.
genarti: Scar from FMA glowering in profile. ([fma] scar does not approve of this)

[personal profile] genarti 2021-09-12 02:51 pm (UTC)(link)
<333333333

Beautifully said. Yeah. Yeah.
minoanmiss: Minoan style drawing of the constellation Orion. (Orion)

[personal profile] minoanmiss 2021-09-12 04:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, this. So much this.
minoanmiss: A detail of the Ladies in Blue fresco (Default)

[personal profile] minoanmiss 2021-09-12 07:34 pm (UTC)(link)

hugs you a lot back

gwynnega: (Leslie Howard mswyrr)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2021-09-12 08:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes. I remember protesting the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and then the beginning of the war in Iraq. It's exhausting and dispiriting to think of everything that has happened since.
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)

[personal profile] aurumcalendula 2021-09-12 09:07 pm (UTC)(link)
This. *hugs*
asakiyume: (nevermore)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2021-09-12 10:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm so sorry you're losing someone to the war--in whatever sense you mean that
choco_frosh: (Default)

[personal profile] choco_frosh 2021-09-12 11:27 pm (UTC)(link)
This.
Also, hugs.
asakiyume: (far horizon)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2021-09-13 12:19 am (UTC)(link)
I'm so sorry. I imagine him spending time with his son in his treehouse... I hope the months and days left to him are good ones, and I hope things change around burn pits :(