Sunday . February 2 . 2003 . 10:32pm |
tragedy Wow, an eventful weekend. Chinese New Year. The space shuttle Columbia broke up upon re-entry. And we had my parents over for dinner. You know, back to the space shuttle (because it partially makes my point, the way I mentioned it so in passing), it's strange because it's such a horrible human tragedy, but I feel like I would have been much more affected by the incident before what happened on September 11th. Now, it's still sad, but the definition of tragedy has since been, unfortunately, pushed to new levels. Whereas before, the news of the space shuttle would have had me riveted to CNN for the rest of the day (watching the same footage over and over and over, see also: the day that JFK Jr. crashed his plane), now I felt more like, "Wow, how horrible. That's really sad for those families. So, where are we going for lunch?" It sounds so horrible, I know, I KNOW, but to be honest, I think that living in New York in the aftermath of September 11th has made that kind of a loss much more of an everyday thing that we all live with. It's impossible not to draw parallels to the space shuttle Challenger, at least in that "where were you when..." kind of way. I was in the third grade. We were in art class, and we were doing work in ceramics. I was, for some reason, making a garbage can (?) out of clay, and painting it over with grey and black stripes. Then another teacher rushed in and told us what had happened. Later that evening, I watched the footage on the news. It was sort of unclear to me what was going on, the flash of the explosion not looking much different to my eye than the pyrotechnics of the launch. But I'm glad that I wasn't watching the launch live. I can only imagine what Christa McAuliffe's students must have gone through, seeing that play out in front of their eyes. Several days later, in class, we were writing condolence letters to the families of the astronauts. I drew pictures of kittens and flowers on my letter, thinking that the drawings might cheer someone up. My third grade teacher deemed the pictures "inappropriate" for some reason and made me re-write the latter without illustrations. (Ironic to note that that same teacher was fired later that year for being "inappropriate" with her students, namely, bringing her punk rock boyfriend into school one day, who threatened the more unruly boys in our class by opening an umbrella in their faces. She wasn't a real teacher anyway. At the time, I attended a small, private school with a lot of non-certified teachers, and she was more a struggling artist-slash-musician looking to make a few bucks teaching third grade. The only evidence I have that she ever even existed is my class picture from that year, where she stood glowering in the back row, clad in all black with a silver-studdeed biker hat on her head. Very 80's punk. But anyway.) What happened to the space shuttle Columbia is a tragedy, but what makes me the most sad is that I'm not more sad about what happened. Maybe this is a sign that human civilization is going down the toilet, that with progressively more and more senseless tragedy, we just start losing the ability to react. I hope not. xo Michelle |
