Sep 11, 2015 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries

Fourteen Years Ago, and Counting …

©September 11, 2015

By Vijaya Sundaram

I was in class, teaching second period English, when it happened. We’d only just moved to our new house, which we were turning into a home. I found out at the end of third period in school, where I was teaching, getting to know my new students for the new year. We 8th grade teachers on my team rushed into the math teacher’s room during our meeting time in fourth period, and watched dry-mouthed, silent and horrified as all the news outlets played that same scene over and over again, like some sort of gruesome nightmare.
Then, when I returned to my classroom for my Prep. period, my husband and I got on the phone each other. He was alone at home, crying. I wept, as well.  When I got home that night, we took a long walk.
This was the most heart-breaking thing I’d seen/heard of in a long time, at that time — even though I knew horrible things went on in the world. I think it was the terrible, all-in-one-fell-swoop enormous nature of the event that captured an elemental fear, and encapsulated it for all of us.
And after that, a long, long nightmare of war was set in motion, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed, in which innocent Afghanis were killed, and several thousand of young American soldiers also died, along with soldiers from Britain and other countries.
All this because some immature, arrogant, money-loving, faux-patriotic, pea-brained, lazy son-of-a-I-don’t-know-what wanted to play at war with all his little soldier boys and girls, and maybe avenge his petty, ineloquent father’s previous war-defeat, and maybe gain some cred. with his pathetic, money-corrupted family.

Sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings here!

I shall end my rant here.

Tags: Personal post