A Few Minutes Post-9/11

Subject: Fear is not my Daily Bread
From: Neill Hamilton
Date: Sep 11 2001 8:48AM

Stuff and nonsense. Fear is only your daily bread if you choose to eat it. No one should make any silly judgments for a good 48 hours. No doubt America is filled with yammerheads who will bay and cry for other innocents to be killed in exchange for our dead innocents. Americans don't, or shouldn't, commit foul deeds to trade for foul deeds. Bury and mourn the dead, take a close look at who rejoices and who joins us in mourning, rebuild and repair. Only then after a steady and thoughtful hunt for the guilty and weighing of evidence should anyone begin to decide what to do. Tommorrow the sun rises for most of us, and the Post Office will be open, coffee will need to be brewed, etc.

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Subject: but burying the dead won't be quaint
From: tom r.
Date: Sep 11 2001 9:21AM

I don't think that we'll go back to discussing lockboxes or education budgets with the same business-as-usual tenor tommorrow though. Like 7 December 1941, 11 September 2001 will go down as a "day that will live in infamy". A voice for this new reality for today's dead from Victorian England:

extracted from "Dover Beach"

... for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold
1867

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Subject: RE: but burying the dead won't be quaint
From: LT
Date: Sep 11 2001 9:35AM

Thanks. Your lovely paragraph on Dylan Thomas a while back led me to start reading his poetry for the first time in at least 15 years.

I was thinking of Yeats myself. The Second Coming, and The Stare's Nest by My Window, especially

We have fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love

I feel that "all is changed, changed utterly." I am steeling myself for the probability that I know someone who was a victim of this. I am also hoping that fraysters of all political persuasions are safe, and that so are the ones closest to their hearts. I am happy my husband changed his flight to arrive on yesterday rather than Tuesday or Wednesday, so he isn't trapped in Europe, although there are worse things...I wat

Right now the other stuff seems trivial.

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Subject: I was thinking of Yeats also
From: tom r.
Date: Sep 11 2001 9:43AM

The lines from "The Second Coming":

...
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
...


are possibly applicable also. We'll have to see about our national leaders. You have to give that to Churchill and FDR, at least they didn't lack conviction.

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Subject: RE: I was thinking of Yeats also
From: LT
Date: Sep 11 2001 10:39AM

Yes, I believe the US and Britain were very fortuntate in their leaders, although neither man was perfect, they were the right people at the right time. I hope for conviction, wisdom and the best response possible to this horror.