nah, in the grand scale of things, the uproar of losing a job - hundreds even - is small, but if I thought in the grand scale of things all the time, I'd feel pretty insignificant, like "cog in the machine". My theory goes that: People have their lives, and they have the lives they read about. What people read, watch - absorb - is essentially fiction. They retain this information differently than if they experienced it first or second hand, obviously.
A plane crashes into the world trade centre in America, but did a plane crash into the Putre World trade centre or even into Suria KLCC, where my mom works? No, and for that reason the disaster cannot personally offend, insense me to the fullest. On a level, personal sympathy can be converted into political sensitivity which is why it is easier for someone to involved himself with a country even if it isn't his native country - a person NEEDS a country or countries to affiliate with, well not really, but it helps the process of self-identification in fact it could ultimately be harmful or sadistic to affiliate with a country (although Azrael in Dogma comes to mind). I can actually be quite objective about it, so that allows me to think about it in broad terms and connecting threads of information without the need for biased premises like "Arabs are terrorists".
It's a media frenzy though, crises like this put power into people's hand to manipulate the flow of information by misinforming. Whether a person actually stood in the world trade center WHILE it was being bombed or not is irrelevant, the fact that he told the story will undoubtely provoke sympathy and that is what the story will be trying to capture. Fiction in its purest form, from the horse's mouth, be it flogged dead or not.
It's shit, death sucks. We suffer we love with the fullest of emotion in the end. We die. But it's the beautiful existence that makes it worth it and that's the crime - asserting the choice of life or death on thousands of people - that is the most unforgivable and outspoken thing that should be realised out of this disaster.
posted by Tshiung Han See at 6:46 PM
september 15, 2001
There have been threats all over the world, shit, nowhere is safe! I was thinking the same thing, Vin ... I don't think the terrorists, whoever they were, do not want to piss off their Muslim brothers at this stage in the proceedings. But let's be real here. Whoever did it, for whatever cause, is fucked. F.U.C.K.E.D. You don't piss off the richest and best armed nation in the world, and then think you're going to get away with it. You'd have to be absolutely fucked in the head. No one can save them now.
I have severe information overload. It is getting really hard for me to not talk in cliches. I haven't been on the 'net more in the past year than I was this week. I have barely slept, and what sleep I have been taking I've been doing during the day. I'm 20 years old (21 in a month) and I'm afraid of the dark again - I have to keep a night light on! I have cable here, so I am getting cbs, nbc, abc and cnn 24 hours a day. Regular programming has been non existent during the week on Australian TV. Tonight, they showed The Simpsons, and I breathed a sigh of relief because shit. I need something to make me laugh.
One of Australia's major airlines closed this week, and there were protests in the city by the people who have lost their jobs. I want to say to them "hey, you can get another job, thousands of people just fucking died you idiots, we are living in a world where the possiblity of all out world war is more real than it has been in a long time." It's hard to keep things in persepective, I don't know what's more important. I've barely gone to uni this week (apart from polisci lectures and tutes), because I've either been too tired or numb or ... I don't know. Too many people have been touched. I think I can safely say that this is the single most abhorrent act I've seen in my life. I don't think there are many people who can say different.
Oh, and I think I'm guilty of using the words 'cock' and 'juice' in the same sentence.