March 10, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Question of the Day for
Question of the Day for New Yorkers: Are you going to watch it?
The answer for me is that yes, I am. I don't like violent things, and I have been extremely put off by the voyeurism of some of the tourists down at the trade center, munching popcorn and chatting gaily away as they filmed what they could of the carnage. So why am I watching it?
Like a lot of people from the city, I still find out, every month or so, about someone else I know who was lost, most recently the first guy I dated in college. And I guess that I want to know what happened to them. And part of me thinks that we ought to know, so that we know exactly why there are boys dying a long way away from here. For us, in the most real sense. . . to avenge our city. Perhaps that makes me hypocritical, given how I feel about the Daniel Pearl tape . . . but what bothers me about the Daniel Pearl tape is not that people want to watch it, but why . . . it's the same thing I feel about those tourists. Many of them come with a sense of -- well, reverance isn't quite the right word, but with a sense of respect for what happened there. They're trying to understand what happened there; to experience it, emotionally. It's not those who make me angry . . . it's the ones whose emotions are so shallow that they experience it only as the tawdriest sort of thrill that something really BIG took place there, or a forum to display ersatz sentiment.
So I'm going to watch it. But I am not without reservations.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 10, 2002 5:33 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links