9/11/2002
Notes from my diary.
Sitting with M&R on an out-of-the-way bench in Ft. Tryon park. A good observance. A little quiet time. I wasn't sure how to treat the date but I suppose the main thing was to know I'd done something, whatever it be, specifically to note the anniversary.Windy and gorgeous, early sunset; we look over the river at Jersey.
I keep being surprised to think it's only been one year. So much of my mind has been on politics for so long; all the politics I've really known has been overshadowed by that one day, a tragedy exploited.
Such a beautiful day, again, today.
A year is a long time to maintain a sense of desperate immediacy. Maybe every activist begins this way. I don't think it's been invalid; I think it's all too likely that future historians will speak of my country, my people, in this year, the way we speak of Germany in the late 30s, or of the McCarthy years. Today I learned that the policies of the US have been condemned "in the strongest terms" by Nelson Mandela. How many times this year have I wished for precisely that--that man, that censure? We are ruled by crooks who hide behind the excuses of children. I cannot be imagining this.
But while I have a lot of energy, I can't devote every hour of my life to the grim contemplaton of my country's ongoing pathology. I don't want to have been a brooding sort of a person.
And yet it is that serious, that anyone who understands it is sorely needed to fight it. I don't have an answer.
Light going and wind building. A bright and restful evening falls to twilight, and soon to crisp clear night.
It's true, about Mandela. And it's exactly the call for reason I've been wanting to hear--but what does it say about the state of our country that we have actually brought down the remonstrance of the world's most respected living man? How has it come to this?
It's hard, sometimes, to hold the meaning of the very real catastrophe in my head, separately from the shamelessly opportunistic use the story has been put to. It did change everything. Twice over.