the 11th

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 14 September 2002 09:47:00

i never said what i did on the 11th. Really tried to avoid it; went into town to get a birthday present for one of our household. It was a sunny day - as I was walking into town I was thinking this is exactly what the weather was like in manhatten this time last year. Anyway tried not to think about it. Got to town at about 1.30, and on every shop window was 'we will be having 1 (or 2) minutes silence at 1.46 in memory of....' etc etc. Became quite tense at this point and hatched a plan. Went to waterstones and bought the rowan williams book 'writing in the dust'. Went to the beach - got there at 1.40. Sat down, with the sun shining over the bay and on me, read the whole thing and felt much better. Ambled back into town and did my shopping.

Aside from the personal i-remember-it-and-being-there-was-tense sort of stuff, i have a more general loathing of the way our governments are hyping up the first anniversary to dupe people into thinking bombing iraq is a good idea. I've been getting really angry about the attitude of some people i share a certain set of bulletin boards with - there was at the time in America in the aftermath of 9/11 a propensity to claim that anyone who asked any critical questions (of the type posed brilliantly by Rowan Williams) was by definition 'anti-american', and of course america is Good and the Current Enemy (whoever the hell it is... communism, bin Laden, Hussien) is Pure Evil. I think we learned this from the movies. Anyway, this is writ small by various people and it actually for the first time makes me think 'i don't want to be here any more', except for the one board i mostly post on anyway. There is enough jingoistic bollocks around, i don't want to read it in my leisure time. For crying out loud.