On September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my computer, checking my emails and contributing to a blog that no longer exists, when I got a phone call from my mother. She was at work at Offutt AFB, doing her civilian job in the STRATCOM personnel office, when the world seemingly stopped--at her behest, I turned on my TV just in time to see the second plane crash into the second World Trade Center tower.
Every generation has its own "I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when ______________ happened" moments. But it seems to me that my generation has had more than our fair share. John F. Kennedy's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Challenger explosion, the terror attacks of September 11 . . . "and the beat goes on." Or, "we didn't start the fire."
Or "the road goes ever on." As worn down by my own personal tragedies as I have been at times, I never seriously wanted to die [I think.--Ed.]--the historian in me can't stand the idea of not knowing how everything will turn out. Or maybe it's the cat in me. Lord knows, I have more than enough curiosity for any three people.
Maybe I won't have long to wait. According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end on December 12, 2012. It's not worth worrying about, because there's nothing we can do about it, but there may be something behind the Mayans' prediction. On that date, a rare astronomical event will happen. Our Sun, the Earth, and the center of our Milky Way galaxy will be in perfect alignment . . . and now that we know that a massive black hole sits at the center of the galaxy, we can surmise that something drastic may indeed happen at the moment of perfect alignment.
Then again, before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, some scientists feared doing so would set the Earth's entire atmosphere on fire. More recently, doom-sayers predicted that running the new neutron collider in Europe would create a mini-black hole that would destroy us all. Since I am still sitting here, typing, I can state with certainty that THAT didn't happen.
My mom is worried that my health will continue to worsen and that I'll start to let go. I keep telling her that no matter how bad my health gets, I'm not going anywhere: (1) I have too much to do--as long as I have even one unfinished craft project, I'm hanging in [and I have probably thousands of unfinished craft projects--Ed.]; (2) I have to find out how everything turns out [it's a rare occasion when I read a novel without peeking at the last few pages first--Ed.] ; (3) living is the best revenge. My ex-husband early this year expressed his wish that I'd die . . . and my response was that if I had to do it on will-power and one nerve, I was going to outlive him, just because of the crappy way he'd treated me when and after he abandoned our marriage. He got my Irish up. He has no one to blame but himself. [I suspect that if he had not abandoned our marriage, I would have died by 1998, just as the doctors who diagnosed my lung disease prognosed in 1988. I'd been telling myself by the time my ex left in 1993 that what was good in him was good enough, but he was draining me emotionally. I see now that I am in every way except financially much better off without his emotional poison in my life.--Ed.]
It's odd, the effects that the momentous events of the age can have on our small, individual lives. After 9/11, many people lashed out against Islam, Arabs, and anyone else they perceived to be "coddling" terrorists. It was sort of a collective wounded animal syndrome. Even people who tried to help got wounded by their indiscriminate anger.
Some of us looked inward and reexamined why we believe what we believe, and asked--and answered--the question of how we may best go about defending and preserving our beliefs. The one thing I know is that the moment we lower our tactics to the level of the terrorists', the terrorists have won. For they have made us abandon our most treasured beliefs, as embodied in our Constitution. That certainty is at the heart of my disgust with what the Dubya administration has done in the past 7 years; it is the core of my fear about what will happen to the country should McCain win the presidency in November.
Nevertheless, I'm hanging around. I'm sticking it out. I need to know for my own satisfaction that the good guys can still win. In the real world of late, it's all too often that the good guys get stomped by those who are willing to say or do anything to win--including accusing their opponents of having the overwhelming ambition that their own behavior reveals. Like lying under oath. Like ignoring the Constitution because it just "gets in the way." Like claiming to be an agent of "change" while voting 90% of the time just as Dubya wants.
Aha! Another lesson learned from Star Trek: in the episode entitled "Mirror, Mirror," a pacifist race called the Halkons is willing to die to the last man rather than to raise arms and fight, just "to preserve what we are." The Halkons knew that their integrity, once cast aside, could not be reclaimed. I daresay, if any of them survived their impending slaughter, they'd reclaim their moral high ground and continue to act in accordance with their beliefs.
Those of us who don't want to see Dubya's Third Term are no different from surviving Halkons. Our integrity is intact; if we win in November, we can bring that back to "official" America and restore the Founders' dreams. The only people who've lost their integrity are those who implemented all the illegal and unconstitutional doings of the past seven years. Their integrity is gone for all time.
There is a lot riding on the next few months. I feel the same way about this that I feel about certain baseball teams who shall continue to remain unnamed lest I unleash yet another jinx: I am full of hope, but part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nonetheless, I'm not going anywhere. If for no other reason, should I not be able to take my craft projects with me, I'm not going to go.
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