I just knew that all the americans combined had to have at least some self serving greed regarding the death of their fellow americans...
My top 3: "I watched from my window, not on television, as the twin towers fell. As shocked as I was, I felt that this was not my problem as a black person. The people who worked at the World Trade Center were mostly white men, and so they had nothing to do with me as a black woman.
When there was an outpouring of grief and donations from every corner of the United States, I said to myself, If those planes had flown into a housing project and the victims were poor blacks and Latinos, people in Missouri wouldn't give a damn. When I heard that there had been over $1 billion in private donations, I asked myself where was this money before? Why hadn't it been donated to help the homeless, children who do not have access to an education, people who do not have access to healthcare? Here we have people rushing to write checks to people whose families will be taken care of by insurance or their employers.
To me, 9/11 was just another example of the American paradigm of deservedness and white entitlement. We are not all Americans; the white investment banker, the white fireman, the white police officer, the white EMT, they are Americans."
"I'm a college debater and the topic last year (decided in August) was international terrorism. What I kept thinking all day was, Damn, my research is completely useless. Those assholes!"
"My sister moved to Brooklyn on the night of Sept. 10. On the morning of the 11th, she and her best friend coped the best way they knew how: They climbed to their roof with a bottle of tequila, watched the towers burn, and toasted the day with a black-humor contest. Whoever could think of the grimmest, ugliest, most horrifying joke would win.
My sister called out, "To an unobstructed view of lower Manhattan!" and tossed off her tequila. The winning toast turned out to be, "To employment opportunities in the New York Fire Department!"
Honorable mention: "When the planes hit ... and when it was clear that they were planes bound for L.A. ... and when it was clear that a massive conflagration had ensued in the towers ... I reached for my calculator. This is a chemistry class thermodynamics problem, went my illicit, cold, train of thought. I use a TI-83 graphing calculator. I used it in my calculus classes at an Ivy League school.
I used it in my chemistry and physics classes there too. I got A's in the classes. Calorimeter problem, I thought; the carbon-hydrogen bonds of that jet fuel are breaking like crazy, releasing energy like crazy, raising the temperature like crazy ... I began to think about the contribution that the rakelike penetrating crash into steel could make to increasing the surface-to-volume ratio of the fuel tank's contents -- and therefore exposure to vaporization and combustion. More C-H bonds breaking simultaneously. Yes, the temperature (delta T in the equation) would render the temperature in the container one that would make solid steel into molten steel.
And then there were the people. I set about calculating the number of people who could be expected to have arrived at work in the towers, the number descending the stairs upon the first plane hit, the rate at which they could walk the stairs in an orderly fashion below the affected floors and the timing of the melting of the towers. Conclusion: that the numbers gone would be the number of people at work on time on a sunny, bright Tuesday in September that would surely have beckoned some to stay in bed with legs happy, moving against deliciously crisp sheets, breathing a late summer breeze through the window ... or to go buy corduroys and a work of fiction ... or to escape to the Catskills ... or to get to work early to turn over a new leaf. Yes, about 3,000 would be gone.
Calculating morbid stuff: It's cold, it's utilitarian, throws Kantian ethic to the wind, reduces people to numbers ... and is very pragmatic if we want to stop and think about what is going on. As Congress sang and swayed, I hit numbered buttons."
ROFLMAO! yeah, that one was pretty high on my list too...
I still love the idea of tequila shots on the rooftop while everyone else is freaking out watching TV and listening to news casters say "oh my god" and "this is unbelievable" over and over and over and over and over and over.....
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
I just knew that all the americans combined had to have at least some self serving greed regarding the death of their fellow americans...
My top 3: "I watched from my window, not on television, as the twin towers fell. As shocked as I was, I felt that this was not my problem as a black person. The people who worked at the World Trade Center were mostly white men, and so they had nothing to do with me as a black woman.
When there was an outpouring of grief and donations from every corner of the United States, I said to myself, If those planes had flown into a housing project and the victims were poor blacks and Latinos, people in Missouri wouldn't give a damn. When I heard that there had been over $1 billion in private donations, I asked myself where was this money before? Why hadn't it been donated to help the homeless, children who do not have access to an education, people who do not have access to healthcare? Here we have people rushing to write checks to people whose families will be taken care of by insurance or their employers.
To me, 9/11 was just another example of the American paradigm of deservedness and white entitlement. We are not all Americans; the white investment banker, the white fireman, the white police officer, the white EMT, they are Americans."
"I'm a college debater and the topic last year (decided in August) was international terrorism. What I kept thinking all day was, Damn, my research is completely useless. Those assholes!"
"My sister moved to Brooklyn on the night of Sept. 10. On the morning of the 11th, she and her best friend coped the best way they knew how: They climbed to their roof with a bottle of tequila, watched the towers burn, and toasted the day with a black-humor contest. Whoever could think of the grimmest, ugliest, most horrifying joke would win.
My sister called out, "To an unobstructed view of lower Manhattan!" and tossed off her tequila. The winning toast turned out to be, "To employment opportunities in the New York Fire Department!"
Honorable mention: "When the planes hit ... and when it was clear that they were planes bound for L.A. ... and when it was clear that a massive conflagration had ensued in the towers ... I reached for my calculator. This is a chemistry class thermodynamics problem, went my illicit, cold, train of thought. I use a TI-83 graphing calculator. I used it in my calculus classes at an Ivy League school.
I used it in my chemistry and physics classes there too. I got A's in the classes. Calorimeter problem, I thought; the carbon-hydrogen bonds of that jet fuel are breaking like crazy, releasing energy like crazy, raising the temperature like crazy ... I began to think about the contribution that the rakelike penetrating crash into steel could make to increasing the surface-to-volume ratio of the fuel tank's contents -- and therefore exposure to vaporization and combustion. More C-H bonds breaking simultaneously. Yes, the temperature (delta T in the equation) would render the temperature in the container one that would make solid steel into molten steel.
And then there were the people. I set about calculating the number of people who could be expected to have arrived at work in the towers, the number descending the stairs upon the first plane hit, the rate at which they could walk the stairs in an orderly fashion below the affected floors and the timing of the melting of the towers. Conclusion: that the numbers gone would be the number of people at work on time on a sunny, bright Tuesday in September that would surely have beckoned some to stay in bed with legs happy, moving against deliciously crisp sheets, breathing a late summer breeze through the window ... or to go buy corduroys and a work of fiction ... or to escape to the Catskills ... or to get to work early to turn over a new leaf. Yes, about 3,000 would be gone.
Calculating morbid stuff: It's cold, it's utilitarian, throws Kantian ethic to the wind, reduces people to numbers ... and is very pragmatic if we want to stop and think about what is going on. As Congress sang and swayed, I hit numbered buttons."
no subject
Date: 2002-09-12 12:30 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-09-12 12:32 am (UTC)I still love the idea of tequila shots on the rooftop while everyone else is freaking out watching TV and listening to news casters say "oh my god" and "this is unbelievable" over and over and over and over and over and over.....
no subject
Date: 2002-09-12 11:50 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-09-12 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-09-12 12:28 am (UTC)