Forgive me, all, for dropping out of character for a few minutes. This is a gaming site, not a personal page or a news briefing or anything of the kind. But it's my venue, and it's the only place I have to publicly post the thoughts I'm having.
I was a bit bewildered when my fellow TA, Dave Stump, came into our shared office at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh at a little after 10 AM on September 11, ignored my greeting, and began writing on the blackboard on the back wall. He stepped away from the board after a few moments, allowing me to see the chilling scrawl: "World Trade Center: Gone. Pentagon: Burning. Capitol Complex: Burning. National Mall: Burning. Planes Hijacked: 6."
"What's this?" I asked.
"The news," he replied.
"You're kidding," I said. I didn't believe at that point, and my emotional radar had not gone off. It was too impossible.
"I hope," he said. "Either that or it's a huge media hoax and all the major stations are involved." He sat at our shared computer and activated Netscape. "Now you're going to look at this with me, so I know if I'm dreaming."
So we went to CNN.com. We looked. We looked at each other in silence. We looked again. And the alarms began to wail in my mind.
The next few hours will be forever burned into my memory as a phantasmogoria of one horror after another, as the news coming in got worse and worse. My office mates and I debated what had happened and what to do next in almost hysterical tones, as if it were up to us to solve the most heinous peacetime crime ever committed. Posvar Hall was filled with small clusters of dazed students, trading rumors, shaking heads, crowding around anyone with a radio. I couldn't fathom how I would be able to teach my lesson that afternoon. It was just as well; the University sent us home at noon. I fortunately found Stacie right away, but unfortunately had to be the first to tell her that the world was ending. We couldn't get a bus home, and the walk didn't help. Neither did the news programs, which stayed on in our apartment from then till 11 that night. The Towers collapsed. Another plane crashed, chillingly 80 miles south of where we lived and even closer to where I grew up. Palestinian crowd cheered at America's comeuppance. Rockets went off in Afghanistan, probably unrelated, but who knew? There was information aplenty, but few reassurances and no answers.
In thirty years, our generation will ask one another where we were the day that the Twin Towers fell, the Pentagon was attacked, and a pilot chose to sacrifice his craft and passengers to prevent a deeper tragedy. And I have no doubt all of us will know, to the moment, where we were when the black news came. It was like a story out of a Tom Clancy novel, a fanciful tale of a terrorist attack on the unassailable monuments of our nation's success. But this was no movie set, no thrill novel. Fighter jets were flying over my peaceful city, patrolling for danger. Countless thousands lay buried in a concrete and steel tomb. America had grounded its aircraft and closed its borders. This time, the nightmare was real.
The disaster was, unbelieveably, not as bad as it could have been. At least one plane never reached its intended target, and the one that struck the Pentagon did relatively little damage. Early rumors of fires at the Capitol and half a dozen other hijacked aircraft still circling proved false. In my own selfish world, I was relieved that no one I knew had been harmed, although close friends of my family have lost several people dear to them. No one is rioting or looting; there is relative calm in the streets. Schools are reopening, and airplanes are getting ready to fly again. Our government, our people, are showing an unexpected solidarity, one not seen in this nation for many months. Life is, in many ways, struggling to get back to normal.
But the change is written on every face, heard in the eerie echoing silence of classrooms and corridors and buses where no one was talking and everyone carried a newspaper. Something has changed in America, something that has touched us all, and it's bigger than the loss of buildings we thought would stand forever, bigger, perhaps, than the unspeakably horrifying loss of thousands of innocent lives. Something is making us weep in the night and wonder what went wrong, making us think every other problem insignificant by comparison. We have been violated, and the wound of the violation will be a long time in healing. The scar never will.
I am tempted to do many things...to cry out for vengeance, to pray for deliverance for the living and the punishment of the butchers responsible for this deed. But I know this will do no good. I remind myself that blood cannot be washed out with blood, and that the righteous cry for vengenace may well have precipitated this act to begin with. So I will not pray for revenge. I will listen to what happens. I will offer my moral support to those brave men and women who work even now to save lives, help the injured, and comfort the dying and the living. I will try to help how I can...by counseling those who need help, by giving blood, by striving to go on with life. And I will pray for us to learn from this tragedy, and by learning, to keep its like from ever again striking our world.
This web site is the home of worlds we visit, in part, to escape from the one we live in, a place where the problems and crises are worse than ours and evil, in the long run, will be conquered by good. It will remain so. But for now, I hope that you all, friends and strangers alike, will take a moment to remember that sometimes the best way we can strike back is to stay our hand and heal rather than harm. Let us save the heroic quests for revenge and justice for Galon and Kaerith, where they belong. Out here, let us take the Ceridwan rather than the Markiran path, and help and heal in any way we can.
~Adam Wells Davis
12 September 2001
I was a bit bewildered when my fellow TA, Dave Stump, came into our shared office at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh at a little after 10 AM on September 11, ignored my greeting, and began writing on the blackboard on the back wall. He stepped away from the board after a few moments, allowing me to see the chilling scrawl: "World Trade Center: Gone. Pentagon: Burning. Capitol Complex: Burning. National Mall: Burning. Planes Hijacked: 6."
"What's this?" I asked.
"The news," he replied.
"You're kidding," I said. I didn't believe at that point, and my emotional radar had not gone off. It was too impossible.
"I hope," he said. "Either that or it's a huge media hoax and all the major stations are involved." He sat at our shared computer and activated Netscape. "Now you're going to look at this with me, so I know if I'm dreaming."
So we went to CNN.com. We looked. We looked at each other in silence. We looked again. And the alarms began to wail in my mind.
The next few hours will be forever burned into my memory as a phantasmogoria of one horror after another, as the news coming in got worse and worse. My office mates and I debated what had happened and what to do next in almost hysterical tones, as if it were up to us to solve the most heinous peacetime crime ever committed. Posvar Hall was filled with small clusters of dazed students, trading rumors, shaking heads, crowding around anyone with a radio. I couldn't fathom how I would be able to teach my lesson that afternoon. It was just as well; the University sent us home at noon. I fortunately found Stacie right away, but unfortunately had to be the first to tell her that the world was ending. We couldn't get a bus home, and the walk didn't help. Neither did the news programs, which stayed on in our apartment from then till 11 that night. The Towers collapsed. Another plane crashed, chillingly 80 miles south of where we lived and even closer to where I grew up. Palestinian crowd cheered at America's comeuppance. Rockets went off in Afghanistan, probably unrelated, but who knew? There was information aplenty, but few reassurances and no answers.
In thirty years, our generation will ask one another where we were the day that the Twin Towers fell, the Pentagon was attacked, and a pilot chose to sacrifice his craft and passengers to prevent a deeper tragedy. And I have no doubt all of us will know, to the moment, where we were when the black news came. It was like a story out of a Tom Clancy novel, a fanciful tale of a terrorist attack on the unassailable monuments of our nation's success. But this was no movie set, no thrill novel. Fighter jets were flying over my peaceful city, patrolling for danger. Countless thousands lay buried in a concrete and steel tomb. America had grounded its aircraft and closed its borders. This time, the nightmare was real.
The disaster was, unbelieveably, not as bad as it could have been. At least one plane never reached its intended target, and the one that struck the Pentagon did relatively little damage. Early rumors of fires at the Capitol and half a dozen other hijacked aircraft still circling proved false. In my own selfish world, I was relieved that no one I knew had been harmed, although close friends of my family have lost several people dear to them. No one is rioting or looting; there is relative calm in the streets. Schools are reopening, and airplanes are getting ready to fly again. Our government, our people, are showing an unexpected solidarity, one not seen in this nation for many months. Life is, in many ways, struggling to get back to normal.
But the change is written on every face, heard in the eerie echoing silence of classrooms and corridors and buses where no one was talking and everyone carried a newspaper. Something has changed in America, something that has touched us all, and it's bigger than the loss of buildings we thought would stand forever, bigger, perhaps, than the unspeakably horrifying loss of thousands of innocent lives. Something is making us weep in the night and wonder what went wrong, making us think every other problem insignificant by comparison. We have been violated, and the wound of the violation will be a long time in healing. The scar never will.
I am tempted to do many things...to cry out for vengeance, to pray for deliverance for the living and the punishment of the butchers responsible for this deed. But I know this will do no good. I remind myself that blood cannot be washed out with blood, and that the righteous cry for vengenace may well have precipitated this act to begin with. So I will not pray for revenge. I will listen to what happens. I will offer my moral support to those brave men and women who work even now to save lives, help the injured, and comfort the dying and the living. I will try to help how I can...by counseling those who need help, by giving blood, by striving to go on with life. And I will pray for us to learn from this tragedy, and by learning, to keep its like from ever again striking our world.
This web site is the home of worlds we visit, in part, to escape from the one we live in, a place where the problems and crises are worse than ours and evil, in the long run, will be conquered by good. It will remain so. But for now, I hope that you all, friends and strangers alike, will take a moment to remember that sometimes the best way we can strike back is to stay our hand and heal rather than harm. Let us save the heroic quests for revenge and justice for Galon and Kaerith, where they belong. Out here, let us take the Ceridwan rather than the Markiran path, and help and heal in any way we can.
~Adam Wells Davis
12 September 2001
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